David Gushee celebrated July 4th with a much-discussed piece in his “Christians, Conflict & Change” column on the so-frequently helpful Religion News Service.
This week Sightings uses Gushee as a single source and relies on Wikipedia as a terse introduction. Well-known as a front-rank evangelical ethicist, he is beloved of the evangelical left and dismissed/hated by the evangelical right. His July 4 comment inspired furious argument, as typified by exchanges in the 142 comments (as of this writing) and elsewhere on the web and in print. Inevitably, almost all of these were framed as argument—which means they are proposed as provocations or theses to defend. I prefer to take them as frames for a conversation, which means they may be re-framed as questions, designed to stimulate thought and back-and-forth reflections.
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