Transubstantiate

HarperCollins, Tyndale, and others warn Trump administration that 25-percent tariff hike will make God’s Word harder to get—and could cause some translations to be discontinued.

The next victim of the mounting trade war between the United States and China: God’s Word.

Although books have escaped earlier tariff hikes by the Trump administration, the latest proposed round—a 25-percent tariff on $300 billion of Chinese goods—includes Bibles and Christian books.

In response, leading Christian publishers testified before the US International Trade Commission in Washington D.C. this week to ask for exemptions.

China is the world’s largest Bible publisher, thanks to Nanjing-based Amity Press which has printed almost 200 million Bibles since 1988 in partnership with the United Bible Societies.

For the world’s largest Christian publisher, HarperCollins Christian Publishing (HCCP), more than three quarters of its production costs are incurred in China. Its portfolio includes bestselling authors such as Rick Warren, as well as the New International Version (NIV) and the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. The two popular translations give HCCP 38 percent of America’s Bible market, which sees about 20 million Bibles sold annually.

“We believe the Administration was unaware of the potential negative impact these proposed tariffs would have on the publishing industry, and never intended to impose a ‘Bible tax’ on consumers and religious organizations,” Doug Lockhart, HCCP’s senior vice president of marketing and Bible outreach, told CT by email.

In a hearing before the trade commission on Tuesday, CEO Mark Schoenwald argued the proposed tariffs will force HCCP to increase its prices, reduce its sales volume, and discontinue some Bible editions.

With more than 800,000 words that can extend to 2,000 thin pages, special bindings, maps, ribbons, and four-color …

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Amid societal polarization, American churches are dedicated July 7th to pray for the country.

Polarization has been trending for a long time. Especially in politics, but also in education, religion, economics, race, and more.

Even suggesting a place in the lonely middle-of-the-road can spark accusations of compromise and capitulation. Like the North Pole and the South Pole, polarization is about opposites that never meet and can’t even see each other. When it’s summer in the northern Arctic, it’s winter in the southern Antarctic.

Introduce a big What If.

What if Christians could set aside the cultural categories and extremes of our generation to center on the faith we all share in Jesus Christ? What if we could do something that demonstrated our Christian hope more than popular despair? What if together we made Jesus the winner rather than seeking victories for our sides of the lines that are dividing so many?

The proposal straight out of Washington, D.C.: Pray Together Sunday. It wasn’t my idea, but I was there when a staff member of the National Association of Evangelicals who is trained as a lawyer proposed a very Christian and biblical antidote to divisive polarization. She suggested choosing a summer Sunday for churches across our nation to pray together for God’s blessing in America.

Good idea with lots of reasons to say no. Of course it’s a good idea for churches to pray. No true Christian should object, but it’s easy to come up with a quick list of why it won’t work:

1. The idea is already taken. We already have a National Day of Prayer on the first Thursday of every May.
2. Prayer is already part of every weekend church service. Asking churches to pray is like asking dogs to bark — it’s what they already do.
3. Getting lots of churches to do anything together is tough to coordinate. Most churches like to make their own decisions, do what they are already doing and value independence over cooperation.

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A theocentric conservation effort looks out for both man and nature.

We sat in the slivered shade of the acacia tree outside of Serengeti National Park. Deus, a 30-something Lutheran pastor, used a stick in the sand to tally the income he generated per month from poaching. He paused after drawing an equal sign. “I preach in church every week,” he said, smiling. “Except when I’m hunting, of course.”

“Church?” I asked. “Doesn’t your denomination see poaching as sin?”

“Oh no,” he replied. “God gives us every animal.”

I stared at him, and he sensed my unease at his benediction of an illegal activity. “Don’t worry,” he said, patting my knee reassuringly. “I pray over every animal I kill. I thank God for each and every one.”

Of course, I knew that God loved the world, but it dawned on me then that Deus’s comment exemplified Thomas Moore’s simple idea in Care of the Soul. “If you don’t love things in particular, you cannot love the world,” Moore wrote, “because the world doesn’t exist except in individual things.”

I was idealistic when I met Deus during my research on human-wildlife interactions in 2007, and the particular thing I loved was wilderness—one unencroached on by poachers. John Muir and Henry David Thoreau’s wilderness: large landscapes unspoiled by human habitation and development. Places to escape to, to unclutter the mind and rejuvenate. Jesus valued wilderness, I reasoned, seeking it out on several occasions. So as a grad student in my mid-20s, I sought it out myself in Tanzania, embarking on a research expedition in the unspoiled wilderness of sub-Saharan Africa.

Everybody Poaches

When I first began interviewing subjects …

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How “casting all my cares upon him” got this Karen girl from Burma to America.

I walked for nine days in my slippers in the deep forest. My father carried all the food. My mom carried my one-year-old brother. My other younger siblings had to walk by themselves. I carried all the cookware, some blankets, and clothes for them.

After seven days, we reached the Tenasserim River and crossed on a big boat. We were climbing the mountain quickly, and I heard the gunfire again. I climbed up the mountain as fast as I could. When I reached the top, I put down all my things and went back to my parents and picked up my younger brother. I carried him piggyback; he held my neck tightly when I had to pull myself up the mountain.

Since I was a little girl, my favorite Bible verse has been 1 Peter 5:7–9:

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith, because you know that the family of believers throughout the world is undergoing the same kind of sufferings” (NIV).

When we suffer as God’s children, we know we are not alone. He is with us, and our brothers and sisters around the world are with us in prayer and solidarity. We testify to share that truth.

I was very tired carrying my brother while climbing the mountain, so I spoke to myself, “Sunday, you cannot die here. You must finish your high school, go to college, speak for your people, and tell the world what you have been through and who you are.”

This is who I am. This is what God has done for me.

I was born in Burma, but I am not Burmese. I am an ethnic Karen, one of more than 10 ethnic minority groups in Burma. The Karen are one of the largest groups among the two million …

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Paul on “good works”—and my replies to initial critiques of this series.

Let me begin this essay by responding to some critiques of the series up to this point, and especially about last week’s essay, “The Church Does Not Exist for the Sake of the World.” While most readers seem appreciative, I expected pushback for the counterintuitive emphasis I’m trying to bring to bear in the series.

Note that word—emphasis. The careful reader sees that I’m not saying that we should forget about loving our neighbor and that I’m not arguing that in glorifying God the church should not reach out in mission. Thus the charges of “binary thinking” or of offering a “false dichotomy” are a failure to read what I’ve actually written.

More to the point: I’m arguing that the evangelical movement in particular has made an idol of activity for God, to the point that God has been increasingly eclipsed from our hearts and minds (though he is still on our lips, to be sure). To call us back to our first love does not mean that I deny the importance of our second love—the neighbor. And to question our idolatry is not binary nor a false dichotomy any more than it was for Jesus when he cleared the moneychangers from the Temple.

Let me be absolutely clear here: I am not like Jesus; I am very much a moneychanger, caught in the nexus of daily life and worship of the horizontal at the expense of a deep and abiding love for my Lord.

One critique I agree with: I failed to note that many missional thinkers are not first and foremost talking about the church’s mission but God’s. That is, it is God’s mission to bring the world to himself, and we just participate in his mission. Fair enough. I will say, however, that I wonder if this picture …

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Does good press lead to greater gains in the Muslim world? Or merely cover a multitude of sins?

Imad Shehadeh’s phone would not stop ringing. His American guest, part of a delegation invited by the king of Jordan, had called his royal host a bigot.

In November 2017, the president of Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary had facilitated a sit-down between local evangelicals and an American delegation bound for a meeting with King Abdullah. Headed by novelist Joel Rosenberg, the US group included several pro-Israel Christians close to President Donald Trump, as well as Mike Evans, a self-proclaimed Christian Zionist leader and founder of the Friends of Zion Heritage Center in Israel.

The Jordanians were somewhat wary. Though Jordan has a peace treaty with Israel, both Muslims and traditional Christians oppose normalizing relations until the Palestinian issue is solved. Jordanian evangelicals, while legally registered and in fair standing with the government, have not been admitted into the National Council of Churches and are often regarded with suspicion over American links.

Meanwhile, Rosenberg was also cultivating a relationship—even friendship—with King Abdullah, coming at his direct invitation. The Americans conveyed Jordanian evangelicals’ great appreciation for Abdullah’s leadership but also politely spoke of a few issues facing the minority community.

One year later, the king was awarded the $1.3 million Templeton Prize for his pioneering efforts to denounce terrorism while strengthening relations between Muslims and Christians.

Evans responded with an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post calling out Abdullah for hypocrisy. Intelligence agents were infiltrating Bible studies and denying visa renewal to evangelical Christian pastors, he wrote. And a Jordanian Baptist was having his ministry dismantled …

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As the first anniversary of the 2015 church massacre neared, public shows of support masked private tensions. But cracks were appearing in the city’s segregated silos.

Editor’s note: Four years ago today, 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof opened fire during a Wednesday evening gathering at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically black congregation in Charleston, South Carolina. Nine members of the church, including its senior pastor, were killed. Charleston-based journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes writes about the slaughter and its aftermath in Grace Will Lead Us Home: The Charleston Church Massacre and the Hard, Inspiring Journey to Forgiveness. The following is an adapted excerpt from her book.

To mark the first anniversary of the attack on Emanuel, hundreds of people gathered in Charleston’s Marion Square, from which they’d march toward the church and, beyond it, to a circle of trees planted at the Gaillard Center in memory of those who died. There, they gathered beneath a white tent to hear from Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. The year after a white racist shot and killed her father, her mother led 1,500 protestors to Emanuel in support of the city’s striking hospital workers in 1969.

She recalled how her father used to say that people feared each other because they didn’t really know each other. Even now, during this march, people had gathered to show unity in this public space, for public consumption. But what about when they went home? When they decided who to invite over for dinner or a beer?

“You have to find ways to come together in private spaces,” King urged.

She paused, letting the message sink in.

“That’s your assignment.”

Subtle Shifts

Indeed, just a few days earlier, a new poll of South Carolinians had revealed that black and white residents …

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Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin envision a future without firearms. Should believers rally to their cause?

Someone, somewhere in America will be the victim of gun violence today. Mass shootings have become part of our routine national experience. What should be done with guns? That, essentially, is the question animating a new book from Shane Claiborne and Michael Martin, Beating Guns: Hope for People Who Are Weary of Violence.

Claiborne and Martin argue that that guns should be destroyed and refashioned. Their argument runs like this: Guns are violent, violence is antithetical to peace, and because Christians must be committed to peace, they should oppose guns. No Christian who cares about peace is energized for violence.

Many readers will be familiar with Claiborne’s previous books on Christian nonviolence. He has been admirably consistent: Christians who take the teachings of Jesus seriously must forsake violence and pursue what makes for peace. In Claiborne’s case, this has meant a recurring emphasis on aiding the poor, sheltering the homeless, and advocacy against capital punishment. Martin, for his part, is the founder and director of RAWtools, Inc., a nonprofit that turns guns into gardening tools. Together, they want to beat guns, figuratively and literally.

Surprising Statistics

Beating Guns offers a useful historical overview of gun markets in the US and an instructive statistical analysis of American gun violence. The book is at its strongest when accounting for the scale of firearm ownership and use in the United States. Many of Claiborne and Martin’s findings are indeed quite alarming. Most people are aware, for example, that Americans own more guns and experience more gun violence than any other nation in the world. But did you know that Americans own half of all firearms globally, even though the …

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No one ever said the life of a pastor was boring.

A month ago, I was preaching at College Church in Wheaton, IL. They gave me 30 minutes to speak and I always try to finish on time, as a means of serving my hosts well.

I usually preach longer than 30 minutes, so I took my iPhone, set the countdown timer for 30 minutes, so I could be in the prayer by the time it hit 30.

And that’s what I did. At 29:50, I started praying to close.

The only problem is that the iPhone countdown timer has a very loud alarm when it hits zero. So, when I was just 10 seconds into my prayer, it went off. College Church is too dignified for me to stop, so—while still praying—I reached over and turned off my phone. I kept praying until I was finished and hoped no one looked up and thought it was someone else’s phone.

Thankfully though, I’m not the only one to have something distract me like that from the pulpit. I took to Twitter to ask some pastors and bible teachers what sorts of distractions they’ve experienced while preaching or teaching and received an overwhelming number of responses. I’ve narrowed the list down to the top 20 stories and list the first 10 here in no particular order.

Believe me, after you read these, you’ll know it was impossible to pick just a few standouts.

1 – A 5-year-old sitting in the congregation was playing with an iPad during the sermon. Somehow, my voice triggered SIRI and she responded aloud saying, “I do not understand what you are saying.”

2 – One time, I tried to preach while sick with a stomach bug. The sound guy fell asleep and I walked off the stage, passed out, and puked into a live mic. When I woke up, the personnel chair and the deacon chair were scrubbing the floor around me.

3 – My young …

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In a world that promises liberation from the limits of place, we are called to be rooted disciples.

My favorite house we owned started out a salmon-pink bank-owned foreclosure on the corner of 800 East and 900 South in Salt Lake City, Utah. When we sold that house to move to the California suburbs six years later, my husband had refinished floors, built me bookcases along the stairs, knocked down a wall to make a bedroom, and we’d painted nearly every wall in the house (the salmon pink was changed to a lovely gray). We knew the floorboards that creaked, the steepness of the stairs, and the quirks particular to a 100-year-old home in the city. The home was more than an address; it was part of who we were and had become.

But it wasn’t just the home. It was the address that meant something. Every address in the Salt Lake valley proceeds from the LDS temple. Our home at the corner of 800 East 900 South was nearly eight blocks east and nine blocks south of the temple. Our homes splayed out along the valley in a grid, where you always knew where you were in relation to the temple—and it was easy to find where you needed to go.

While Salt Lake City grew in racial, cultural, and religious pluralism, our addresses told a different story. We all—Mormon, Christian, atheist, none, secular humanist—had to coexist in a system and geography formed around the LDS faith. Places shape us. The geography of a place affects how we live and what we’re oriented around. While we may not have an address that overtly acknowledges a place’s cultural or religious center, our places nevertheless revolve around ideas, values, and institutions.

Places form us. It would be easy to wax poetic about place (from the goodness of farm-to-table local cuisine to neighborhood little libraries), yet ignore how many of us …

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