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When Was the Last Time You Talked Baseball With Your Enemies?
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John Walton talks about Adam and Eve on Unbelievable
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Wouldn’t the Resurrection of Jesus have been a great time for Him to drop that offensive immoral Old Testament?
Resurrection
After my last three sermons one of the church members mentioned an ABC TV show entitled “Resurrection” where people in this small town return to life sometimes years later and how that impacted their relational networks. I decided to watch the show and am half way through the second season. I’m not endorsing the show. The initial idea was thought provoking but like many TV dramas couldn’t really keep from devolving into something between a soap opera and a crime drama.
While the imagined resurrections in the TV series didn’t really have much in common with the asserted resurrection of Jesus Christ one issue that hold dramatic tension in the show was of course the questions of cause, purpose and meaning. OK, so if you have to buy the idea of people coming back from the dead, as the characters in the show were forced to do, how are you to understand what this means about the nature of reality and more importantly the purpose for their return? The “living” TV characters of course immediately would grill “the returns” for intimate personal historical knowledge that no body double or alien could reasonably duplicate. Even while the “it’s really them” question lingers the reality that you need to deal with these people relationally as their former selves had to be engaged. But how does their return change the worldview, or deep assumptions of reality of the living? These are much harder questions.
Most Americans in the Folk-Religion Mushy Middle Continue reading
Posted in On the way to Sunday's sermon, Understanding the Bible
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Mennonite Church in USA on Agreeing and Disagreeing in Love
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Why “3 Myths about Calling” Falls Short
I’m all for the Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr ego beat-down in which we learn to subvert the “small self.” But, this idea that the true self lives somewhere deep inside you is the kind of pseudo-Platonic dualism which so pervades American folk theology that everyone just assumes it’s true. I mean, if Oprah said it then it must be true, right?
The problem is, it’s not true, and it’s not Christian thought. More than that it’s dangerous. I’ve seen many a family destroyed by a spouse’s search for the “true self.”
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Young Women Nostalgic for Past Evangelical Lives
I remember this pieced last year “why I miss being born again” and I just read Dianna Anderson’s piece in a similar vein. I thought they were both lovely, honest posts.
The young post-Christian nones may become one of the most self-righteous generations we’ve seen in a while and its interesting how both of these voices are nostalgic for a former self-righteous certainty that now feels naive.
I hears an interesting podcast with Rachel Held Evans recently and thought about how she’s maturing, growing in her capacity to embrace some of the compromises and ambiguities that adult life schools you into.
The spirit of the age I think especially for smart, aggressive, articulate young women is a moralistic one. All the trend lines are moving in their favor and it is heady stuff. There is nothing like success to help you imagine that you’ve finally arrived. There is nothing like the age of decay to take it all apart. I suspect they are not finished with nostalgia.