I can’t speak for my coreligionists, but, personally, I wish they’d break the bad habit of making supposedly authoritative scientific truth claims from the standpoints of theological orthodoxy and devotion to doctrine. The religious mind–which conceives the world in terms of myth, mystery, ritual and wonder–has its own value apart from the rational endeavors of the scientists and the philosophers. The religious mind seeks a unique truth, even when its truth discloses a reality also pursued in other disciplines. Its methods of inquiry and verification are different than those of science and philosophy. Let them dialogue, but let’s not confuse them. Because each has its own truth to offer, religious faith and reason have much to say to one another. In my opinion, we benefit from listening to both and from cultivating a mind informed by both religiosity and reason.
Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish - separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.
(via invisibleforeigner)
When Paul refers to ‘the gospel’, he is not referring to a system of salvation, though of course the gospel implies and contains this, nor even to the good news that there now is a way of salvation open to all, but rather to the proclamation that the crucified Jesus of Nazareth has been raised from the dead and thereby demonstrated to be both Israel’s Messiah and the world’s true Lord. ‘The gospel’ is not ‘you can be saved, and here’s how’; the gospel, for Paul, is ‘Jesus Christ is Lord’.
…since the word ‘gospel’ was in public use to designate the message that Caesar was the Lord of the whole world, Paul’s message could not escape being confrontative: Jesus, not Caesar, is Lord, and at his name, not that of the Emperor, every knee shall bow.
We, and our opinions and perspectives do not dictate what the Church is now and certainly not what it has been, and the experience of this loss of control is itself salutary. We are not the hub, the spring of significance, the norm of interpretation in the Church, and neither is any other one segment of the body. The Church was clearly blasphemously wrong for the greater part of two millenia on the subject of slavery; many would add that it has been no less wrong for even longer about the status of women. To be ‘catholic’ now means to resist the temptation to blot out and forget this past and the equally powerful temptation to condemn from a superior vantage-point. This kind of catholicity obliges us to recognize the Church’s continuing liability to failure and betrayal … We can only be grateful that even a slave-owning church had just enough sensitivity to the challenge of the gospel for a protest to be generated (however slowly) and a new awareness - of which we are the direct beneficiaries - to come into being. This is a catholicity which may weep over the universal liability to error, yet rejoice at the universal pressure towards truth, penitence, and transformation.
(via simplyanglican)
Listen to this again:
Colorblindness has nothing to do with eradicating racism. It is about denying its existence and power.
That is the truth. We are all racists. We’re hardwired to like people who are similar to us, and we’re hardwired to be a little afraid of people who are different from us. It’s part of our makeup. The thing is, though, that we don’t have to let this be all we are. We can choose something better. Believe me: it is a choice. It’s not an easy choice. It’s not a choice we manage to make 100% of the time. But we can choose — we must choose! — to extend respect and dignity to all human beings.
Don’t find fault, find a remedy. Anybody can complain.- Henry Ford
I’ve had this poster lined up to write something about for a long long time and for some reason have always held out on posting it. However, it seems timely now considering the discussions going on online pertaining to the Kony 2012 campaign that has gone viral, and the critiques it has received.
I believe there lies an elusive sweet-spot between naively accepting everything the world sets before us, and being the eternal cynic that only ever opposes and complains. Both extremes have their serious drawbacks and, unfortunately, both extremes are probably the norm. That is, more people stand on one side or the other, than do those in the middle.
But the truth is (if there is such a thing) that the middle ground between blind acceptance, and contrary opposition is the only place where remedies are found. The elusive, complex landscape where we can piece together the truth from the fragments kicked around on both sides of an issue and then, putting aside our ‘right to be right’ instead focus our energy on something outside ourselves.
The solution.
In the case of Kony2012 (and other things such as terrorism, starvation and many of the dire problems people fight over) , the solution may not be immediately apparent. But the discussion stirred up by both the viral video and it’s surrounding controversy will hopefully open the doors to something more than just mere awareness.
Hopefully, we will find the creativity and strength in numbers to find remedy.
O Lord, you have taught us that without love whatever we do is worth nothing: Send your Spirit and pour into my heart your greatest gift, which is love, the true bond of peace and of all virtue
And so I urge you, go after experience rather than knowledge. On account of pride, knowledge may often deceive you, but this gentle, loving affection will not deceive you. Knowledge tends to breed conceit, but love builds. Knowledge is full of labor, but love, full of rest.
…language can be a window through which one glimpses God, but never a box in which God can be contained.
I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the timewaking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me .
I’ve been thinking and fighting and toying with the idea of prayer for a long time…
It’s something that confuses and frustrates me in unique ways.
Recently an idea that keeps finding me is that prayer “doesn’t change God- it changes me.”
I think I need to try to dedicate some more time/brain energy into this topic…
In a controversy the instant we feel anger we have already ceased striving for the truth, and have begun striving for ourselves.
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
Does love conquer all?
“Ever since Nietzsche it has been customary to sneer at the apparently wimpish vision of human life in the Beatitudes: the meek, the mourners, the merciful, and so on – when surely everyone knows that the people who make the world go round are the arrogant, the go-getters, the people with sharp swords or at least sharp elbows, the pushy, the proud.
Actually, all Nietzsche did was to articulate what many people, including many would-be Christians, had believed de facto for centuries, but the point is that they, and he, were wrong.
Every professor knows how frustrating it is when a student comes to class so arrogantly convinced of their own theory that they cannot pay attention to the evidence. (Sometimes, of course, students feel that about professors, too, and that makes its own point.)
A University will thrive and flourish, and a society led by its graduates will thrive and flourish, when the Beatitudes’ different, upside-down vision of human flourishing takes effect: when people realise that humility and meekness before the evidence and before one’s peers are the marks of real academic strength; when they recognise that a hunger for justice and a love of mercy form the elusive centre of healthy societies; when they discover that, having invented a thousand clever machines for making war, it is long overdue that they should find one that would make peace.”
— N. T. Wright, The Great Story
I really needed to read this today.
Just yesterday I was saying that I find the ‘brand’ of Christianity I frequently encounter from some of the vocal Christians I know or hear seems to favour the idea violent power and strength, and an angry God. I keep hearing that this message of love and mercy is over-rated. That peace will only come when we wage war and that Christianity has become too ‘sissy’. It’s never said in so many words of course, but that’s what the many statements boil down to at the end of the day… At least to me.
And I just don’t get it.
It leaves me feeling hopeless and confused.
Like the Black Eyed Peas I can’t help thinking, “Where is the love?”
I never thought someone could write a post tying N.T. Wright and Black Eyed Peas together…
Life in Christian-Conservative T̶e̶x̶a̶s̶ Barbados
Replace ‘Lubbock, Texas’ with ‘Barbados’ and this says it almost perfectly.
This small island-country is pretty much the Bible-Belt of the Caribbean. And if life in Lubbock Texas seems contradictory and confusing, life here is equally as paradoxical.
Behind the facade of dread-locks, sandy beaches and sunburnt tourists - the Caribbean is a strange blend of extremely conservative Christian culture and fairly liberal behavior.
