Welcome to this week’s “Life Changers” – where I share good reads around the internet, pieces that make me smile, think, and say: me too. Hope you enjoy! (I realize it hasn’t been a full week since the previous post, but my list was getting long and I wanted to get it out to you!)

Watson advocates for feminism, specifically calling men to join the fight for equality:

I want men to take up this mantle. So their daughters, sisters and mothers can be free from prejudice but also so that their sons have permission to be vulnerable and human too—reclaim those parts of themselves they abandoned and in doing so be a more true and complete version of themselves.

An announcement from Scot McKnight:

This is an offer for parents of children 3-10 and also — ahem — for grandparents and aunts and uncles and anyone who cares about the Christian development of small children.

7 Strange Questions that Help you Find your Life Purpose – Mark Manson

So when people say, “What should I do with my life?” or “What is my life purpose?” what they’re actually asking is: “What can I do with my time that is important?”

ISIS and the Good Samaritan – Zack Hunt

Because it forces me to humanize ISIS militants. It forces me to remember that despite the atrocities I witness on TV, there are actually real human beings behind those black masks.

People who act like monsters to be sure, but people who were created in the image of God just like me. They’ve absolutely distorted that image in profoundly perverse ways, but if there’s any truth to what Jesus said about the Good Samaritan, then we have to force ourselves to consider the possibility that they’re not actually altogether evil.

Consumed by Thoughts of Consumerism – Jamie Wright (the Very Worst Missionary)

I’d seen their faces, they’d seen mine, and for a brief moment, my comfortable retail world was invaded by the harsh reality of the people whose shoulders it rests on, people who are trucked in like cattle to make my every wish come true.

I’m telling you, the magic is gone. The fleeting tingle I used to feel when I came home with the latest, cutest, cheapest thing, has been replaced by something… significant.

When it comes to the big vision stuff, I go with Barbara Brown Taylor. I embrace the big-hearted, inclusive vision of Christian love, welcome and hospitality. I believe that God is love and that the one who loves, in the words of 1 John, knows God. Love is how you know God. Full stop. That’s what I believe and that makes me sort of liberal.

And yet, I agree wholeheartedly with Stanley Hauerwas that this liberal vision is prone to sentimentality, superficiality and self-absorption. For many liberals Christianity reduces to tolerance. And tolerance is a far, far cry from the sacrificial, kenotic self-donation that marks the Way of Jesus.

That sort of love involves training, discipline and sacrifice.

We have to work towards having honest speech with each other. When we have honest speech we have to speak out about the things that are unjust and unfair. We need a more honest and abrasive speech to bring our talk into connection with our social reality.

As a woman, an African American, a seminarian learning in an Indigenous context, wife, mother, and spiritual unicorn, I’m going to speak from of my personal social location. It’s all any of us can do, really. The perfect, neutral space of thought is an illusion. It is precisely my social locations that morally bind me to be a justice seeking whole human being.