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Mistakes — when there is no “wrong thing”
We can be so eager to punish mistakes — ours and the ones others make. But that doesn’t seem to be what Jesus is doing.
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The Purpose of Punishment
We want punishment to communicate what it can’t. It’s bad at telling us what not to do and fails to tell us what to do. Punishment isn’t the point. The purpose of punishment is to communicate our intolerance of certain behaviors. It is not about feeling good exorcising our demons stealing the dignity of others…
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Mercy Is What We Love
It strikes me that our society is more interested in public shaming than actually changing the behavior of its people. We are more interested in taking pictures of people watering their lawns during a drought than we are in more effectively curbing the practice, or better, than transforming how Californians landscape. Of course, I’m not…
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Teaching Mixed Messages: love, violence, and more Walking Dead
The Michigan Militia It was the late 90’s and several militia groups, most famously the “Michigan Militia” had bloomed in the thumb-area of Michigan, just down the road from my college. The populist rage that would a decade later birth the Birthers and the Tea Party was a post-Waco response to a perceived lack of…
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Missed communication in misbehavior
Parents struggle from the moment their babies are born to understand them. We listen intently to hear the different cries–the I’m-hungry cry; the I-want-you-to-hold-me cry; the I-refuse-to-admit-I’m-tired cry; and the far too common I-just-want-my-way cry. The discerning parent learns to tell the difference in these cries. Each has a differed tone and different facial expressions.…