Leadingchurch.com

Religion on ESPN over Jason Collins coming out in the NBA. ThinkChristian

Patrol – A review of religion and the modern world: What Really Happens When People Lose Their Religion? http://goo.gl/mag/pG0GlwD

Quotes:

What I converted to was not, as I understood it at the time, some sort of objective “view from nowhere” outlook that only had beliefs to the extent their truth could be demonstrated empirically. It was rather, as Taylor puts it, “a certain package uniting materialism with a moral outlook, the package we could call ‘atheist humanism,’ or exclusive humanism” (9034), or, as we could perhaps even better call it, “dull, platitudinous liberalism.” It’s amusing now how little this new philosophy intrinsically had to do with the materialism I’d become convinced of. Nothing about individual liberty, human rights, or civilizational progress follow automatically from the fact that “God is dead.” The new picture is “shot through with values” (8869), however insistently it takes itself to “emerge out of careful, objective, presuppositionless scrutiny” (8890). There are as many value judgements in liberal humanism as there are in its parent religion, and many people who come to the point of unbelief are happy to accept them despite objecting to the similar ungroundedness of Christianity.

link

A Norwegian TV show asks girls to convert to Islam for a chance to win tickets to a Justin Bieber concert. Link

http://youtu.be/XpaOjMXyJGk

Link to the article. Others describe themselves as more beautiful than they describe themselves.

Our Way Of Life

What happened in Boston last week? Two Muslim immigrants exploded two crude bombs killing 4 and wounding many more and the USA marshaled massive forces against them. I would assume that same day many others died violent deaths in other places even within the United States and the president gave no speech. It’s clearly not simply the loss of life that touched a nerve.

This of course isn’t that hard. The attacks were designed for their symbolic value. The bomb could have been placed in many other places for similar effect. The overriding question after the explosion was of course what motivated the bombers. What did the bombing mean? Meaning was of course everything.

Our contemporary liturgy of crisis continues to adapt to the realities of cable news and the Internet. Fear is expressed and catalyzed by our interpreters of the events filling websites and air time. It is obsessive and frenetic. The breathless priests of our electronic cathedral spur on the faithful while they exegete the events. The ancient litany of boasting is employed to give heart to the people and strengthen their sense of identity and community. Boston gets to now follow New York in this. It is ritual. It creates us while it comforts us.

Our leaders and media commentators speak the truth when they observe that these events aren’t simply killings and mamings,  again we don’t roll out the president simply for loss of life, his precious time is rightly reserved for threats to our way of life. What exactly are we talking about though that is threatened?

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