Leadingchurch.com

Rolling Stone

The Dish summary

Sullivan’s “deep dish” summary (behind paywall)

Nothing necessarily new here, just well said. 

Personally, I am an almost-anabaptist. I think that Christians (I can’t really speak for others) have been foolish to think that Western Culture and governments will do us any favors. They will pursue their own interests, apart from what traditionally religious people think. Politicians and cultural leaders will use religious language and people as long as it is useful, then jettison it at the first opportunity so that they are not tied to anything that will hold them back from possessing more power and authority. If you want an historical example, look at how the left now writes about the civil rights movement: it is seen as a secular movement that had a few religious people tagging along for the ride, not a religious movement that had some secular like-minded folks working toward the same goals.

Priests try to stop political violence in Kiev

Might seem like a strange thread on this blog. I’m working on the second commandment. The Internet is an amazing resource.

Buddha Statues Continue reading →

Christianity Today pt 1

With all three of our go-to carrots we are calling young people with the same thing: Self-interest. We are teaching young people that the main reason for you make a particular sexual decision is directly related to whether or not it will benefit you. If we are calling them with self-interest, then according to our axiom from earlier, we are calling them to self-interest, and the problem is that self-interest in this area, will be unsustainable for most people.

The promise of future relational fulfillment, sexual satisfaction and a consequence-free life has a difficult time standing up to the reality of humans in relationships. We are broken, frail and fail with regularity. Some of those anticipated idyllic marriages—even when waited-for—will end in divorce; many will have sex lives in marriage that don’t add up to what they anticipated; some will remain single but always long for that promised relationship as the pinnacle of human love; some will be completely on the outside of the Evangelical narrative because they have no meaningful attraction to the opposite sex. It is these exceptions to the rule, these examples where what we call them with is unsustainable, that make me seriously question the entire approach.

Part 2

nyt

She came to feel the legacy of millions of people who had struggled with the same feelings for thousands of years. “I still have routine brushes with agnosticism,” she says. “I still brush against the feeling that I don’t believe any of this, but the church always brings me back. …I don’t think Jesus wants to brush away the paradoxes and mysteries.”

Her lyrics dwell in the parts of Christianity she doesn’t understand. “I don’t want people to think I’ve had an easy time.” She still fights the tendency to go to extremes. “If I’d have been an atheist I’d have been the most obnoxious, Dawkins-loving atheist. I wouldn’t have been like Christopher Hitchens.”

The disposession of Latoya Ammons | Indianapolis Star | indystar.com http://archive.indystar.com/article/20140125/NEWS/301250013/The-disposession-Latoya-Ammons

Follow up from Dreher looking for stories. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/the-boy-who-was-possessed-remembers

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/evolution-the-culture-war/

As Sailer points out, it is perfectly possible to reconcile the spiritual and moral equality of humanity with what science tells us is true about human biological variability. The problem, I think, is that we humans are bad at this. Given the history of the 20th century, I flat-out don’t trust our species to handle the knowledge of human biodiversity without turning it into an ideology of dehumanization, racism, and at worst, genocide. Put another way, I am hostile to this kind of thing not because I believe it’s probably false, but because I believe a lot of it is probably true — and we have shown that we, by our natures, can’t handle this kind of truth. We will use it to construct ideologies that justify inhumanity with the authority of Science.

Link list with Rod Dreher, Andrew Sullivan leading back to Dana Gioia 

I don’t think most people come to God (or most other core beliefs) through rational argumentation. They usually do the reasoning afterwards to explain to themselves and others why they believe. We experience faith, as we do almost everything else in life, holistically. We feel it with our emotions, intuition, and imagination as much as with our intellect. We even experience with our physical bodies.

The power of art is that it speaks to us in the fullness of our humanity. When the Church loses that capacity, it loses [its] ability to speak to most of humanity in its natural language. Theological arguments don’t even convince theologians to change their minds on a topic.