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What The Bible Says Good Samaritan's Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice

What The Bible Says Good Samaritan's Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice

What The Bible Says Good Samaritan's Penny Pulpit by Pastor Ed Rice

Oldies but goodies...

The highlife musician challenged the materialism and extortion he encountered too often in the church. Kofi Owusu Dua-Anto, a Ghanaian gospel musician who challenged church leaders with his catchy songs, died last month age 45. Known professionally as KODA, the artist passed away suddenly on April 21 after a yet-undisclosed short illness.KODA won awards for his vocal and musical finesse and production skills, but he used the platform his music offered him to speak out against the materialism and self-promotion he believed had overtaken his country’s church leaders.“What is being preached from the pulpit? If it’s just the aesthetics of Christianity … the flashy things of how the man of God has visited 20 churches in the UK or the US and how he stood in T. D. Jakes’s church … if that’s the vision … then that’s what [Christians will] chase,” he said in 2021.In 2013, KODA put these concerns to music when he released “Nsem Pii” (“Many Issues”).“Fifteen ways to be successful, 13 ways to make much money, but the one way to make to heaven, preacher man, you don’t preach about it,” he sang in both Twi, a Ghanian local language, and English. “Listen, last Sunday I heard you preach; I must confess, I was confused, was that church of GIMPA?” (GIMPA or Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration, is a prestigious public university in Ghana.)The track surprised many in the local Christian community, one that traditionally practiced unquestioned reverence toward pastors and church leaders, and the gospel music industry, which generally only sang about God and commented little on culture.KODA credited the Bible as his inspiration for his lyrics.“I was reading the Acts of the Apostles from [chapters] 1 to ...Continue reading...

Drake and Kendrick Lamar's rivalry reveals our craving for controversy—and what's lost when community is based on shared hatred, not love.This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.Not since Tupac died have we seen the country quite as fixated on a feud between rappers. Over the past several weeks, artists Drake and Kendrick Lamar kept the news cycle abuzz with their dueling diss tracks—ridiculing each other in trivial matters of height and weight and popularity before getting nastier with implications of secret love children and the possible grooming of minors.As the lyrics amped up, police even investigated whether the argument was related to a shooting of a security guard outside Drake’s home in Toronto. For most people, though, the feud didn’t seem dangerous; it just seemed fun. And that’s what worries me.I am far from qualified to judge who the better artist is between Drake and Lamar. My dogs were named Waylon and Willie, but, come to think of it, the Outlaws wrote a diss track or two themselves. Even so, if this were just a story about musicians’ egos battling, it could be quickly forgotten. The greater concern is not that these two artists have diss tracks, but that we are all living in one ourselves.Drake and Lamar obviously do have some genuine dislike of each other. I share sarcastic barbs with a good friend sometimes, but I’ve never accused him of being a pedophile or of neglecting his child support. And yet, it also seems that much of this feud is theatrical—meant to mutually benefit them both.After all, the question in the music industry press right now is not whether restraining orders will be sought but whose tracks are beating whose on the charts. The truth is, no matter who is “winning” or “losing” in that competition, both are winning. People ...Continue reading...

Discrimination case claims that noncommercial religious broadcasters are paying far more than fellow stations to cover royalties for music played online.The website for 99.1 JOY FM in St. Louis features a scrolling playlist of its lineup of Christian pop music and a “listen now” button to tune in to the simulcast broadcast. But visitors may find that after a few hours of streaming artists like Lauren Daigle and Brandon Lake, the site may kick them off.Because of higher royalty costs, many noncommercial religious broadcasters are choosing to either limit the number of online listeners they allow at a time or simply not promote their online platforms at all. A new lawsuit from some of these broadcasters, including many Christian stations, claims that their royalty rate, which exceeds what other stations pay, is effectively a form of religious discrimination.“The government is charging religious broadcasters a significantly higher rate,” said Rory Gray, with the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF). “It suppresses religious speech in the public sphere.”Noncommercial radio stations—which rely on listener support and grant funding rather than ad sales—have traditionally been able to negotiate lower royalty rates for the music they play. But religious broadcasters, like JOY FM’s owner, Gateway Creative Broadcasting, lost out on that deal during negotiations in 2016 with SoundExchange, the rights management company that distributes royalties to artists.Then streaming costs for religious radio increased in 2021, following a ruling from the US Copyright Royalty Board (CRB), and Christian stations were subject to the standard rates. A suit filed in February against the board claims that due to the discrepancy in rates set by the CRB and privately negotiated rates, noncommercial religious broadcasters are forced to restrict their streams ...Continue reading...

Unperturbed by debates over the book's relationship to modern thought, she helps us appreciate its marriage of literary structure and theological claims.In her latest book, Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson insists that modern readers have largely misunderstood the literary and theological significance of the Bible.Among the most salient causes of this misunderstanding, she argues, is our tendency to read ancient texts through modern categories—history, myth, fiction, nonfiction—that do not map neatly onto ancient literature. The result is a never-ending and mostly unnecessary debate between those who approach Genesis as a catalog of events and those who read it as mythic pastiche, pieced together from various ancient sources.We get a feel for Robinson’s impatience with this debate in her characterization of the factions warring over Noah’s flood: “One side in the controversy is rebuilding the ark to demonstrate its seaworthiness, or tramping up Ararat looking for its wreckage. The other sees the story as cribbed and fraudulent.” Both sides, Robinson concludes, are led astray by the same impulse to judge the veracity of Genesis on the basis of how closely it conforms to historical events.In fact, as she argues at the outset, “the Bible is a work of theology, not simply a primary text upon which theology is based.” The implication for modern readers of Genesis is that when we focus primarily on the historicity of the Flood account, for example, we tend to ignore the arrangement of Genesis as a work of literature designed to grapple with theological questions.Arranged with artistryThis is not to say that Robinson doubts whether all the events represented in Genesis took place or that she fails to consider its compositional history. The goal of Genesis, in her estimation, is not to offer a play-by-play of primeval events but ...Continue reading...