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Like Minded Deviants

Like-Minded Deviants with Dr. Lindy Backues, Jon-Michael Odean, and Justin Stewart-Fritz is a podcast that seeks to deviate from the norm. As two of Lindy’s former graduate students, Justin and Jon-Michael bring an extended friendship with him cultivated over years, enriched by their present ministries, life as educators, a good dose of grassroots practitioning, and deep respect as close friends and colleagues. Each week these three come prepared to engage in a provocative conversation. A conversation that intentionally and sometimes irreverently unpacks events and ideas plucked from newspapers and headlines, unashamedly channeling these conversations through a theologically jarring lens.

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Like Minded Deviants

Love?! What Does That Even Look Like?!

July 27, 2021 • Dr. Lindy Backues, Justin Stewart-Fritz, Jon-Michael Odean • Season 1 • Episode 9

So many of our popular songs, hit movies, favorite poems, social media spin around us the notion of love. We all teach about love, sing about love, long for love, shoot--we even cry out for love! That being so, surely we must know what love is, right?! No doubt, we got love down, don’t we, since we seem obsessively focused on it almost all of the time? Not so fast! Let’s be real, WE know, that YOU know, that we really mean different things when we say, ‘we LOVE tacos’ and ‘we LOVE our significant other’ .

We think the problem might not be that we are so unfamiliar with love - instead, might we not be too familiar with it? If that is so, how might we recognize the kind of love that the gospel story describes about what God in Jesus did for us? Is love even the best way to describe what we find in the gospel story? Come Deviate with us and start the conversation!

Texts:

David P. Gushee & Glenn H. Stassen, Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context, 2nd Edition, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2016 (ISBN: 978-0-8028-7421-4).
Donald A. Hay, Economics Today: A Christian Critique, Regent College Publishing, 2004 (ISBN: 978-157383284).
Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: Community, Cross, New Creation, A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics, HarperOne, 1996 (ISBN: 978-0060637965).

Readings:

‘The Greatest Commandment: Love’, Gushee & Stassen, Chapter 6
‘Three Focal Images: Community, Cross, New Creation’, Hay, Chapter 10