Patton Dodd is an amazing writer. In an odd way, I hope he never becomes mainstream ‘christian’ literature in the US.

He’s too good, and that sounds unfair. I don’t see how his work could be marketed honestly in the hyper christian book market.

He has a chapter from his book at SoMA I’ve read three times. I’ll probably read it again. I’d like at some stage to be able to read the whole book.

It’s the cognitive dissonence he collides with and begines to embrace that resonates so strongly with me.
In this chapter he is a student at Oral Roberts University when he begins to see that what is happening around him, doesn’t line up with what he is receiving (rhema) from Matthew about the life of Jesus.
The chapter is: A List of Screwy Christian Stuff.

I slide down into my seat, into my boggling. This, I will discover, is a strange breed of Pentecostalism, a teaching of personal empowerment that had a heyday but is in its dying gasps. But everyone seems on board with it in this moment, and that frightens me into wondering if I am supposed to be on board, too.

Also on the Screwy list: Is Jesus mean?

I am sitting in the lighting booth at the Mabee Center, running lights for a conference (it’s my work study gig; nice work if you can get it). I raise the lights at one point and lower them at another, and have ninety minutes in between to fill as I please.

I please to fill these minutes by reading the Gospel According to Matthew, but I am not pleased to discover something there that I have never noticed before: Jesus sounds rude.

The Jesus I know, the Jesus I love, is uniformly kind, caring, sacrificial, wise, supernaturally powerful. I’ve read the gospels regularly for over a year now and have found this Jesus reliably present. But now, for some reason, as I turn the crinkling, red-and-black inked pages in the lighting booth, a new, sterner Jesus suddenly and forcefully comes into view. A Jesus who is unhelpful. Intentionally confusing. Rude.