Tried With Fire

When I was growing up, I often heard the same questions from my classmates - Do you use chopsticks at home? Do you eat rice every day? Do your parents own a restaurant? Do you speak Chinese? (Answers: Rarely, usually, no, no.) I don't think these kids realized they were imposing a cultural stereotype on me. The stereotype may have been absorbed through ads like the  Calgon Chinese laundry commercial  and other inaccurate depictions of Chinese Americans. I don't know if they consciously knew they were being racist, but these biases have a way of infiltrating our minds. If we never stop to question them and learn otherwise, they remain firmly rooted, and out of the heart the mouth speaks. In You Are What You Love , James K.A. Smith uses stereotypes as an example of how we learn, not through conscious thought, but by habit. Stereotypes are just this sort of unconscious, habituated way of perceiving the world and acting accordingly. No one "signs up" to hold prejudi...

The following excerpt is from The Happy Christian by David Murray, in which he tells the story of what happened in the checkout line at Walmart. He left this chapter to the end of the book because it may be the hardest for his readers. I appreciate his transparency because this is a hard confession to make: "Wouldn't it be much better if they weren't here? Yes, that's the question that arose in my mind. Followed by: What right do they have to be here? Which suddenly provoked an inner dialogue:     Hey, you're an immigrant yourself, Murray!    Yes, but I'm not a Mexican immigrant.    What's the difference?    Well, I'm white and speak proper English.    So what? Does that make you better than them?    Well, yes ... I mean, no ... I mean..." "It was an unforgettable moment of painful self-discovery. I had to face the facts. I was prejudiced. Racist even. It had been there all along, but it was being exposed in all it...

I borrowed Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Champagne Butterfield on Wednesday and finished it by Saturday. It is the amazing story of the conversion of an atheist lesbian college professor to Christ. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it hard to put down. She writes candidly about her struggle to come to faith and the complete train wreck it made of her life. She also tells of her transition to becoming a Reformed Presbyterian pastor's wife and their journey to parenthood through adoption and foster care. But I was especially moved by the process of her conversion because God used a means as simple and ordinary as friendship. Butterfield was befriended by a Reformed Presbyterian pastor and his wife. Ken and Floy Smith invited her to their home. They didn't ram the gospel down her throat, even waiting two years before inviting her to church. They were honest about their belief in God, His Word, and what it said about her lesbianism, but that did not d...