Leadingchurch.com

Fascinating piece from the Washington Post on this schoolyard subject.

NY Times piece.  Pieces like this raise deep questions about the survivability of the human race on planet earth as presently construed.

James Schaap’s blog noting the outing of Jonah Lehrer for plagiarism. Linked to a longer piece on Slate detailing the violations.  Schaap also has some comments on information and knowledge.

“But one of the downsides of all of that info is it has become, for all of us, much more difficult to determine what’s true and what isn’t. When the air is full of words, discretion becomes more tedious, more difficult, and, quite frankly, more impossible. ” This was a quote from his blog. 🙂 Just trying to do due diligence. 🙂

Saw this story about a Christian inspirational speaker with no arms and legs: “Nick Vujicic on why God Made Him Limbless”

The “God made me ________” has been filled with a lot of things: beautiful, black, white, gay, straight, alcoholic, autistic, and also limbless.

I was doing some pondering yesterday on the loose new age conception of god, that we are all somehow emanations of the divine. Why do the Abrahamic religions so vehemently oppose this idea? Because they all assume the presence of evil. Evil is not just a different way of looking at things, it’s an enemy, offensive, intolerable, something that must be banished from existence.

Reformed doctrine has long assumed that the brokenness of this world touches everything, including how we were born. It is always a tough thing to attributed God’s desire and design to something that exists. Christians of course do this too, when bad things happen like Paul’s “thorn in the flesh” the Lord refuses to remove it. The Christian understanding of how God uses evil to do good is nuanced and complicated. We never get the language right to suss out the relationship. “Allow, permit, cause” etc.

Whether it’s in a marriage, in a church, or any other kind of relationship complaint and response is a regular part of the picture. Don Elium, a marriage counselor in Walnut Creek outlines what in his opinion is healthy and helpful complaint vs. unhelpful.

He also quotes a sobering statistic from Gottman that only 1/3rd of what is complained about in a marriage will be resolved to the plaintif’s satisfaction.

 Do healthy complaints solve all problems? No. John Gottman’s scientific marriage research found that all couples could fully resolve only one out of three problems; this was in both happy and unhappy marriages. Two out of three required compromise. Healthy complaints allow for real feelings to be expressed and the actual event to be brought into focus. It makes healthy compromises more possible. From there you have a much better chance to work something out that may not be perfect, but something more positive that you both can learn to live with!

Cool, scary, telling about what we value and our images of “the good life”.

And an article entitled “The Cure for Christendom”

And a quote:

For Kierkegaard, every human being is tasked with the responsibility of becoming a “theological self,” which means to relate properly to God, to others and to oneself. Selfhood is both a responsibility and a process which is deeply relational and which culminates, for Kierkegaard, in an authentic embrace of Christianity. This involves recognizing one’s deep need for God, accepting God’s forgiveness, and being willing to follow the way of Christ. This is a “narrow way,” which leads to suffering and to “collisions” with the world. For Kierkegaard, being a Christian is not a matter of mere orthodoxy or church membership, but of relating to God through the passion of faith (which he called “subjectivity”). Christianity is an existential journey—a quest. You don’t become a Christian: you are always becoming a Christian. 

Link. And all the small church pastors said “Amen”.