MFEO Twitter Giveaway: Clarence Jordan & Dallas Willard
This week I’m going to be giving away books by two authors that I think are M.F.E.O. (Made For Each Other): Clarence Jordan and Dallas Willard:
- The first book is Sermon on the Mount, New Testament scholar Clarence Jordan’s commentary on Jesus’ most seminal teachings. Few Christians in history speak with the weight of authority that Jordan does, having given his life to the practice of these radical teachings.
- The second book is Willard’s now classic bombshell The Divine Conspiracy, which contains his interpretation of The Sermon on the Mount. If you haven’t read this, you need to. Please Note: Both these books are used, so you’ll have to live with annotations and underlines : )
Here’s how the giveaway works:
- Follow me on Twitter @pastoralia
- Tweet this message:
Don’t miss! @pastoralia giving away 3 amazing Christian books by Dallas Willard & Clarence Jordan & a documentary DVD http://bit.ly/bYTyzr
- The winner will be randomly selected and announced a week from today on Monday, February 15, from among my Twitter followers who Tweeted the message above. Please Note: You must follow and Tweet that message in order to win.
Bonus giveaways!
If the number of Twitter retweets reaches 1000 I will also give away one of each of these bonus prizes to two additional winners:
- Dallas Wiillard’s new book, Knowing Christ Today in audiobook form from Christianaudio.com, and
- A DVD copy of the fantastic documentary Briars in the Cotton Patch, which chronicles the story of Clarence Jordan’s Koinonia Farm in the turbulent race wars that led up to the civil rights movement.
Monday Morning Poetry: A Poison Tree by William Blake
William Blake was a prolific seventeenth-century painter and poet who was unknown as an artist during his lifetime and whose work and views on Christianity remains highly controversial even today.
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water’d it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,
And into my garden stole
When the night had veil’d the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch’d beneath the tree
Sunday Morning Meditation: John Piper on Hell
John Piper gets his turn at bat here on Pastoralia concerning the subject of hell. Does what he’s saying here contradict what NT Wright was saying last week?
Flannery O’Connor On The Need For Violent Critique
Occasionally a Christian friend or colleague will express frustration with the highly critical tone I often take here towards the Church. They ask why I can’t be more positive and affirming (for that is what good leaders do, or so they say). To them I offer the words of Flannery O’Connor:
The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock-to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.
Unless we are willing to accept our artists as they are, the answer to the question, “Who speaks for America [or the Church?] today?” will have to be: the advertising agencies. They are entirely capable of showing us our unparalleled prosperity and our almost classless society, and no one has ever accused them of not being affirmative. Where the artist is still trusted, he will not be looked to for assurance. Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.
Of course, there is an important function of leadership that offers “what we ought to be” as well, but often the difference between those who are angry with critique and those who offer it is that the former prefer the cheery optimism of advertising while the latter are serving up the prophetic unmasking inherent in art. There can be no vision without critique, no forgiving embrace without just exclusion, no joyous thanksgiving without grievous lament.
I don’t think I’m overstating the case when I say that for many in the Church today “leadership” is essentially conceived as a function of marketing. But in my view that is a betrayal of the leadership gift, which I think is a role more akin to art than advertising.
