- Non-isomorphic education.
- Faith Church.
- Environmental fundamentalism.
- Oops! Her bad!
1
Some Orthodox PhD types have been musing on what it would take to create another Orthodox College or even University in North America (there’s Hellenic College in Brookline, MA and there was flash-in-the-pan Rose Hill in Aiken, SC). Symposium talks are aggregated here.
Some of the talks are fascinating. Few are uniquely Orthodox (“under which jurisdiction would the college and Chapel be?” is one of the few distinctly Orthodox questions). Most are generally applicable to anyone thinking of the challenge of a “non-isomorphic” (distinctive) institution to preserve something precious as the barbarians march on us.
2
A local Church for which I’ve long had an incorrigible soft spot has dropped Baptist from the name. I have coincidental bits of what may be inside information, but “Faith Church” deserves the right to control the message within the bounds of truthfulness, so I won’t risk sharing it.
“We don’t want people to think because we have that word in our name we’re like every other Baptist church,” says head Pastor Steve Viars. Indeed, it would require institutional multiple personality disorder to be like “every other Baptist church,” as Baptists, adherents typically of a distinctive “soul competence” doctrine, generally are the ne plus ultra of fractiousness and defiant congregational independence. Some Baptists are flat-out loathsome, and you can’t even put “Baptist” in scare quotes or add “self-styled” when alluding to them because “Baptists” are just about whatever any one of them says.
I noted 30 years ago in a law journal note that denominational distinctives are downplayed these days. In the case of Protestant church property disputes, I lamented and still lament that. A congregation that splits over some doctrinal issue (probably the denomination drifting, if not running, away from historic Christianity) may suddenly find that the one and only doctrine the denomination tenaciously holds is that it is generally “hierarchical” in polity, and that it, therefore — not majority congregational vote, let alone a court — gets to decide which faction (is “faithfully” Methodist, or Presbyterian, or [whatever] and) therefore gets the building and all other church property. “Covenant Church” in West Lafayette lost part of its former name in a very deliberate and carefully-negotiated parting from its former semi-hierarchical (“connectional”) denomination.
Baptists have never had the problem of discovering that they unwittingly had been giving to a congregation within a hierarchical or even connectional denomination, as Baptists are as congregational (non-hierarchical) as can be. Faith Church will “put something over” on nobody by its name change.
On the downplaying of denominational distinctives generally, not in the prelude to church property disputes, I have mixed feelings that I may sort out some day.
3
Ann Althouse fills in for the late Ann Landers in a piece with which I could hardly agree more, from beginning to end — especially the end.
4
This one, though, is a total dud since it’s Republican fundraisers, not Obama fundraisers, getting “Irened out” in the Hamptons.
* * * * *
If you’re missing political rants, I’m sorry, but I was giving the impression that I cared, so I stopped blogging politics. “They” are all idiots except for the ones who are rogues. But RogerWmBennett Tweets about politics and stuff over in the right-hand column. I generally agree with the guy.
Tipsy
Bon appetit!
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 