Leadingchurch.com

Tim Fall

• Catholic Education
• Baylor U
• 40 days?

https://www.osv.com/Article/TabId/493/artmid/13569/articleid/16977/Default.aspx

Apart from joint biological parenting, it also didn’t matter very much whether the parents were same-sex or opposite-sex. I compared opposite-sex parent families in which only one parent was a biological parent — think step-families — or neither parent was — think adopted children — to their same-sex counterparts, and found no differences in child emotional problems.

There is no evidence, in other words, that the quality of parenting, parental support, parent-child dynamics, etc., are less beneficial for children with same-sex parents than for those with opposite-sex parents, when those parents are not their natural mother and father. The point is not that same-sex persons, whether married or not, are not somehow less loving or effective as parents, but that, unlike opposite-sex partners, they cannot jointly procreate a child, which is the type of natural relationship in which children thrive best, by far, with regard to emotional health.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2015/02/18/not-your-typical-ash-wednesday-by-josh-patrick/

Kicking and screaming (vs. singing and dancing) http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/02/kicking-and-screaming-vs-singing-and-dancing.html

http://theweek.com/articles/536299/whats-wrong-political-correctness-few-observations-from-amansplainer

Reformation21

In light of this, I suspect that the reasons evangelicals are rediscovering Lent is as much to do with the poverty of their own liturgical tradition as anything. American evangelicals are past masters at appropriating anything that catches their fancy in church history and claiming it as their own, from the ancient Fathers as the first emergents to the Old School men of Old Princeton as the precursors of the Young, Restless, and Reformed to Dietrich Bonhoeffer as modern American Evangelical. Yet if your own tradition lacks the historical, liturgical and theological depth for which you are looking, it may be time to join a church which can provide the same.

Finally, it also puzzles me that time and energy is spent each year on extolling the virtues of Lent when comparatively little is spent on extolling the virtues of the Lord’s Day. Presbyterianism has its liturgical calendar, its way of marking time: Six days of earthly pursuits and one day of rest and gathered worship. Of course, that is rather boring. Boring, that is, unless you understand the rich theology which underlies the Lord’s Day and gathered worship, and realize that every week one meets together with fellow believers to taste a little bit of heaven on earth.

• Catholicism or Consumerism?
• Leithart: Keep the Fast, Keep the Feast
• Lent 101 The Upper Room (example of common approach)
• CNN on Lent Introduction

• Diane Rehms Show

From CS Lewis the Weight of Glory

Apparently what I had mistaken for humility had, all these years, prevented me from understanding what is in fact the humblest, the most childlike, the most creaturely of pleasures—nay, the specific pleasure of the inferior: the pleasure of a beast before men, a child before its father, a pupil before his teacher, a creature before its Creator. I am not forgetting how horribly this most innocent desire is parodied in our human ambitions, or how very quickly, in my own experience, the lawful pleasure of praise from those whom it was my duty to please turns into the deadly poison of self-admiration. But I thought I could detect a moment—a very, very short moment—before this happened, during which the satisfaction of having pleased those whom I rightly loved and rightly feared was pure. And that is enough to raise our thoughts to what may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please. There will be no room for vanity then. She will be free from the miserable illusion that it is her doing. With no taint of what we should now call self-approval she will most innocently rejoice in the thing that God has made her to be, and the moment which heals her old inferiority complex forever will also drown her pride deeper than Prospero’s book. Perfect humility dispenses with modesty. If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself; “it is not for her to bandy compliments with her Sovereign.” I can imagine someone saying that he dislikes my idea of heaven as a place where we are patted on the back. But proud misunderstanding is behind that dislike. In the end that Face which is the delight or the terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised.

Lewis, C. S. (2009-06-03). Weight of Glory (Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis) (pp. 37-38). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

Gallup