Patriotism as a temptation is an interesting concept to me.<\/p>\n
I’ve been poking at the outer edges of it as I slowly prepare for Sunday evening at our home congregation<\/a>. That’s when and where I’m supposed to talk for some 35 minutes on “Avoiding the Temptation of Patriotism.”<\/p>\n I hope I can offer some helpful, challenging, encouraging perspectives. More importantly, I want to anchor what I say on the Scriptures.<\/p>\n Will I be able to declare, on the basis of clear Scriptures, that every person should be a patriot? I hope so. \ud83d\ude2f<\/p>\n If you are a regular reader of Ain’t Complicated<\/i>, you know that I am an American second<\/a> and not at all a patriotic American.<\/p>\n Does that, then, make me anti-American? Absolutely not!<\/b> In fact…<\/p>\n “OK, OK,” he said stoutly to himself, “time to close this post and say no more until after Sunday. Then perhaps you can post your notes to flesh out and balance out this post.”<\/p>\n “Good idea!” he answered back to himself, supportively. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Patriotism as a temptation is an interesting concept to me. I’ve been poking at the outer edges of it as I slowly prepare for Sunday evening at our home congregation. That’s when and where I’m supposed to talk for some 35 minutes on “Avoiding the Temptation of Patriotism.” I hope I can offer some helpful, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,8],"tags":[749],"class_list":["post-2390","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christianity-101","category-politics","tag-patriotism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prJUJ-Cy","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2390","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2390"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2390\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2390"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2390"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.eaf.net\/mvp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2390"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}