Countdown: Day 8

On March 15, Naked Spirituality will go on sale. I’ll share a short quote from the book each day until then. I hope you’ll tweet or otherwise pass on the ones you find most meaningful.

If Nehemiah’s contemporaries were leading us in prayer today, imagine the issues and groups they would name in American history: ethnic cleansing of Native peoples and enslavement of kidnapped Africans; discrimination against Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants and Jews; group profiling of Germans, Japanese and now Latin Americans and people from the Middle East; McCarthyism; segregation; deaths of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; denial of the vote to women and tolerance for domestic violence; mountaintop removal and climate change; oil spills and toxic waste; corporate plunder; the disproportionate recruiting for military service among the poor; pre-emptive and elective wars. What would corporate repentance for these kinds of sins feel like? What effects would flow from it? (Brian D. McLaren, Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in Twelve Simple Words. HarperOne, 2011, Chapter 9)