Leadingchurch.com

Much of this is over my head, but compelling stuff nonetheless. Link.  Quotes to follow:

I would like to compare Taylor’s typology to one of Andrew Delbanco’s that I commented on in the Epilogue to my Festschrift in 2002. Delbanco organizes his small book, The Real American Dream, into three chapters entitled God, Nation, and Self. These he sees, using Emersonian terminology, as “predominant ideas” which have successively organized our culture and our society, providing a context of meaning which can bring hope and stave off melancholy. In speaking of God as the predominant idea that first organized our culture Delbanco is thinking primarily of the New England Puritans of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nation became the predominant idea from the time of the Revolutionary War until well into the twentieth century. Most recently Self seems to have replaced, or if not replaced, subordinated, God and Nation as the predominant idea of our culture.

Delbanco does not argue for strict chronological epochs, seeing many overlaps. Nor does he emphasize quite as much as I would or Taylor would the continuing centrality of Nation as a “predominant idea” in the United States, but who can doubt that, especially among the educated classes, Self has become a powerful focus. With some problems of whether the Puritans were paleo- or incipiently neo- (indeed in my piece I argue that all three forms are incipient in Puritanism) Delbanco’s typology maps rather easily onto Taylor’s.

Yet there is still another, more ominous aspect of the world today that must inhibit any undue optimism about wonderful ideas that have been around for a long time in the great religions and in modernity at least since Kant’s essay on universal peace. That is the stern Durkheimian warning that ideas cannot float too far from a viable social base if they are to be effective.

First heard about this article on the Phil Vischer Podcast. Link (Hope it lasts, darn WSJ paywall.. 🙂 )

This guy too of course has his slant, but his point’s a good one. In all fairness no one in the US is talking about silencing the guy who made the Islamic Youtube trailer. I also suspect that the Broadway show is far more clever and well done than the Youtube bit, yet that of course makes it more artful in tearing down the Mormon faith. How does that play into it? Does that make it make it better because it illuminates better? Shouldn’t false or stupid religions be shown to be wrong in as skillful a way as possible or is even this conversation an example of the supposed firewall between “faith” which doesn’t have to be true to be useful (therapeutic) vs. someone who stands up and says something untrue about something that “matters”? This can generate a lot of though and discussion.

Wonderfully observant. Link

Quote:

So the Starbucks lifestyle was its own fundamentalism. Its central article: Customers are always right. Our mission was to affirm their gluttony and ignorance, their boredom and complaints, their narcissism, their anger, hysteria, nose picking, and violence.  Affirm their love, their joy, their kindness, integrity, graciousness, honor, and nobility. It’s the Third Place: where customers pay money to people who pretend to understand them when they act like children and pretend that Starbucks is a pleasant, tolerant, and virtuous place. Or, and this is the terrifying part, it’s a place to pay for the pursuit of a life that goes no deeper than going around and being only physically present for transactions of various magnitude.

It’s an interesting world we live in. “Wishing they were left intact…” 

From Reformed Worship. 

From the piece:

The same expressivism is behind those versions of the “all-of-life-is-worship” principle that sees gathered Sunday worship as basically optional. It is a “Reformed” version of the “spiritual but not religious” canard that waxes eloquent about the “church” of nature and the sacred experience of a mountain sunrise.

But throughout the course of its history (including the Reformation), the church has always understood worship as more than expression. Christian worship is also a formative practice precisely because worship is also a “downward” encounter in which God is the primary actor. Worship isn’t just something we do; it does something to us. Worship is a space where we arenourished by Word and sacrament—we eat the Word and eat the bread that is the Word of life. This understanding of worship is equally central to the Reformation heritage, and it is at the heart of John Calvin’s legacy.

If we fail to appreciate that Word and sacrament are specially charged conduits of the Spirit’s formative power, it would be easy to imagine that worship can happen just anywhere. On the other hand, if we appreciate that Christian worship around Word and table is a unique “hot spot” of the Spirit’s wonder-working power, then we will also appreciate that the sanctuary can’t be replaced by just any other space in God’s good world, for it is in the sanctuary that we are made into a people of praise. In communal worship we receive the unique promise of the Spirit that is tethered to Word and sacrament.

• “You just need to want to be a better person”
• “Just hold your religious beliefs more loosely”
• “If you do the right things you’ll get the outcome you want” (From God, Karma, the universe, etc.)
• “You can be anything you want to be. Just work hard, believe in yourself hard enough and you can do it, get it, become it.”
• “‘Spiritual but not religious’ is a good idea”

Notes:

These items mean well. In most cases the opposite is also not true. There is often some value to them but each has a serious flaw that if left alone plants the seeds to its own destruction.

Too well done. 🙂