The death of a prophet

I had a plan for this email, and it involved Pride Month and our delightful June cover story. But then last week Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann died. Brueggemann’s words—particularly his writings on the Psalms and his masterpiece The Prophetic Imagination—have had a profound effect on my faith and work. His sorting of the Psalter into poems of orientation, disorientation, and new orientation helped frame how I understand my spiritual journey; his distinction between priestly and prophetic functions helped clarify my ministry. We have a brief but poignant tribute to Brueggemann from Jason G. Edwards.

I still have the June cover story for you: “Notes on (Christian) camp,” by Brandon Ambrosino. This campy homage to a 1964 essay by Susan Sontag explores the overlap of Christian faith and camp, a sensibility often associated with gay culture. “The cross of Christ,” Ambrosino says, “is as campy as it gets.” I’m also excited to share with you a piece from a new ex-vangelical friend of mine, Lauren Cibene, who describes a deconstruction of her politics that mirrors her parting of ways with evangelical faith.

Plus even more great content. In our video of the week, I chat with columnist Phil Christman about (real and imagined) persecution of Christians in the US. Scroll down for our editors’ excoriation of the current Congress, a new poem about turning 50, and more.

Jon Mathieu
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Walter Brueggemann’s gift of disruption

“Brueggemann didn’t give us easy answers. He gave us tension. He gave us poetry. He gave us language when our own ran dry.”

by Jason G. Edwards

Notes on (Christian) camp

“A campier way of writing the creeds would be to say not that Jesus and God share the same divinity, but that they share the same quotation marks. But no one consulted me.”

by Brandon Ambrosino

I’m a deconstructing American

“The versions of America and Jesus that my community—and, as it turns out, a significant portion of the country—wanted no longer made any moral or spiritual sense to me.”

by Lauren Cibene

In the Lectionary for June 15 (Trinity C)

Wisdom is frisky and frolicking. She reminds us that God created our impulse to learn and to grow.

VIDEO: Real and imagined persecution of Christians in the US

Columnist Phil Christman chats with Jon about what persecution does and doesn’t look like in the US.

Worse than doing nothing

“There is one area where this Congress has really put in the work. House leaders whipped votes to squeeze through a budget proposal that takes billions from the poor, gives billions to the rich, and adds trillions to the national debt.”

from the CC editors

Half a Century

When I lived alone on the north coast,
I was slender as a glass of skim milk
and wore my house dress by the sea. …

poem by Karen An-Hwei Lee