Some time ago–10 years? 15 years?–I began to hear Evangelical pastors encourage their flocks to “love on” other people. As in, “Let’s make hot chocolate and sandwiches and go ‘love on’ those homeless people in the park” or “I know Brother or Sister X is struggling with their faith right now, but we’re gonna ‘love …
Author Archives: portiahopkins
When “Love” Is Not Love
In Sonnet 116, Shakespeare claims: Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds. As generations of my students can attest, I scoff at “refrigerator magnet Shakespeare”—quotes taken out of context because they are pretty or sound wise, and that usually have a more complex meaning than will be evident from the quote. And …
Love at the Center
When we think about what most characterizes a Christian, it should be love. And yet, far too often, Christians are associated in the public imagination with being legalistic, judgmental, and even hateful. Something has gone badly wrong. And it isn’t just that somehow Christians have been misunderstood. It is that what some Christians have been …
“Salvation”
One of the key incidents in the reconstruction of my faith happened as I worked through my grief at my father’s death. I had been taught a hard-lined Evangelical sense of “salvation”—if you haven’t said a specific prayer “asking Jesus into your heart,” you are not a Christian and are going to hell. I was …
Reconstructing
I can’t really say I ever expected to find myself here–58 years old, unemployed after leaving a job of 25 years, in the fourth year of a three-year (yes, really) Master of Divinity degree program, living in student housing after a month of couch-surfing and sleeping in my car–and happier than I’ve been in years. …
Faith vs. Certainty
Many conservative Evangelicals would no doubt say that they are certain that they are right about faith. In this, they are missing something very important: faith and certainty are not the same thing; in fact, faith and certainty are opposites. Faith is not necessary if one is certain of anything; it is being uncertain that …
Recovering Evangelical
I became a Christian as a teenager in the late ’70’s, in the latter days of the Jesus Movement, when that decision meant being “born again.” At the time, I didn’t realize that it also seemed to mean swallowing the entirety of the conservative Evangelical expression of the faith. It wasn’t long before a steady …
The Recovering Evangelical 