Leadingchurch.com

http://charlesfeatherstone.com/wp/?p=719

Our Smartphones, Ourselves http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2015/01/17/our-smartphones-ourselves/

You are what you share http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2015/01/you-are-what-you-share.html

The End of American Civic Christianity, Dreher

There are important debates about how and why the liberal order has attained this dangerous, all-encompassing absolutism.

Linker

But here’s what also needs to be said: certain forms of contemporary Islam are an enormous, confounding problem and a threat to the liberal political and social order. The threat isn’t just from bombs, bullets, and butcher’s knives. It’s also, and perhaps more gravely, from ideas that may well be fundamentally unassimilable to a liberal way of life.

Liberalism offers the following deal to individuals and groups: give up the hope of controlling the whole of social life, of using government power (and violence) to enforce your vision of the highest good, and allow the natural pluralism of society to grow and flourish; in return you’ll be granted the freedom to find a home within that highly differentiated socio-cultural ecosystem, a place where you and those with whom you freely choose to associate can also grow and flourish in peace.

Tolerate — and you will be tolerated in turn.

That’s the liberal bargain. It is one of the finest achievements of Western civilization, and one of its greatest gifts to humanity in all times and places — nothing less than an all-purpose strategy for getting along despite our often rancorous disagreements about the highest good and ultimate ends of life.

Relevant

Parse

• The Meme
• The Response

The hope is of course that this won’t feed the cycle, but it probably will.

This is the cycle. I know it well.

It only ends when we stop and decide to love, to give, to be a living sacrifice.

This most reminds me of the kind of fight between a divorced couple who can’t let each other go. The world watches in painful fascination until the fight just starts to look insane.

The Cross

I think it is the cross where the cycle ends. Jesus hangs wearing the wounds of his enemies, spittle of mockers surrounded by the jeers of those who called him evil. He saves others by not saving himself.

Becoming a Person

The moment we become a person is the moment we wake up to our misery regardless of a million causes and excuses. We own our sin. We know it is ours regardless of the failures and responsibilities of others.

Then we see the naked sinless man emptied of all but love surrounded by mockers and we realize he did it for me, he did it for us.

It is from gratitude that we love the jerk, the idiot, the criminal, and my enemy. We love the sinner freely, just like we are loved.

The Fumie, Again, It can’t be said enough

Japanese author Shusaku Endo wrote the book “Silence“. It is novel based around the attempt to end Christianity in Japan during the 17th century. In the novel a young priest is sent to investigate the apostasy of a Jesuit brother.

Christians are being arrested, tortured and killed. Those alive are being coerced to renounce their face by stepping on the “fumie”, a crudely carved image of Christ.

In the climax of the novel Christ breaks his silence and invites the priest to trample upon him.

Yet the face was different from that on which the priest had gazed so often in Portugal, in Rome, in Goa and in Macau. It was not Christ whose face was filled with majesty and glory; neither was it a face made beautiful by endurance to pain; nor was it a face with strength of a will that has repelled temptation. The face of the man who then lay at his feet [in the fumie] was sunken and utterly exhausted…The sorrow it had gazed up at him [Rodrigues] as the eyes spoke appealingly: ‘Trample! Trample! It is to be trampled on by you that I am here.’[4]

TGC

Woman keeps vows to husband disabled by a bicycle accident. CRCNews