Kevin Brown
Список книг автора Kevin BrownLiturgical Calendar
Using the structure of the liturgical calendar and the lives of the saints for inspiration, Kevin Brown explores not only faith, but subjects ranging from love to childhood and from grammar to grace. The saints' backgrounds serve as metaphors for our lives today, as we struggle with our mortality and our morality. In these poems, Brown is able to laugh at himself and his failings while reminding us of our own. He points out where our various approaches to faith make us better people and where we fail to follow what we tell others to do. In these poems, the miraculous becomes ordinary even as ordinary events and people are imbued with the sacred, granting readers hope for themselves and for the world.
Another Way
Like many young Christians, Kevin Brown had what he believed to be a strong faith, one that provided answers to all the questions he had and might encounter. He even attended a Christian college and considered becoming a youth minister. While there, though, he began having doubts about his faith, began asking questions that came from discussions both in and out of the classroom–questions he couldn't find answers to. When the church told him he shouldn't be asking those questions, he left the church and his faith behind. He kept asking questions, though, and kept looking for a faith that would allow him to have questions and doubts, yet still believe. What he found may offer an answer to the religious divide in our society–one that separates evangelical from progressive Christians, one that separates sacred from secular.
In this memoir, Brown describes his spiritual journey from his first faith to the loss of faith to the way he found back to a Christianity where he can ask those questions, a different way than he knew before. He still has questions and doubts, but he also has faith, in spite of and because of those questions and doubts.
Bringing the Kingdom
People have used the Bible for a variety of purposes over the course of the past two thousand years; unfortunately, many of those uses have reinforced power structures and systems that oppress and dominate those without privilege. Worst of all, people have used the Bible as a means to divide humanity into those who are worthy of salvation and those who are not. However, if we look at the lectionary readings, especially the gospels, we can see that God actively seeks to undercut and subvert systems of power, and God calls Christians to do the same. Through an examination of Jesus's teachings, with support from a wide variety of other parts of the Bible, we can see that ideas of social justice and true liberation run throughout God's message to humanity. Rather than focusing on who gets into heaven and who doesn't, Jesus seeks to proclaim God's love for all humanity. By reading the Bible this way and attempting to live up to Jesus's call, we can seek to bring the kingdom to our world, as it is in heaven.