Testimony
I’ve now heard two podcast interviews with Jon Ward and was sufficiently impressed by him that I’m pre-ordering his new book, Testimony:
A respected journalist, Ward asks uncomfortable but necessary questions, calling those inside and outside conservative Christian circles to embrace truth, complexity, and nuance. He recounts his growing alarm and grief over the last several years as evangelical conservatives attacked truth, rejected personal character, and embraced authoritarianism and conspiracism. He shares his search for a faith that embodies the values he was taught as a child.
Ward’s experience and reflections will resonate with many readers who grew up in the evangelical movement as well as all those who have an interest in the health of the church and its impact on American life.
Sin as an ontological problem
“Is it a sin to withhold help from someone in need?” The answer is yes – but not in a merely legal sense. It is a sin – a movement towards non-existence – a movement away from the proper direction of our lives.
Fr. Stephen Freeman, The Erotic Language of Prayer
Saved by Grace
We are indeed saved by grace. However, the Protestant meme that interprets this as mere judicial kindness is an egregious error. Grace is the very life of God, the Divine energies, the fire by which we are transformed into the image of Christ. We do not earn it, but we can certainly shield ourselves from its action. Christ describes this in terms of a seed sown among thorns ….
Fr. Stephen Freeman, Rest for Your Soul
A forgotten homily
And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man
One of my earliest television memories, probably still the 1950s, was a British comic reading this with exaggerated antiquity (“an hairy man … an smooth man”) and then delivering a homily on it.
Unfortunately, I can’t remember anything about the homily. If the comic had a prophetic streak, it could have been free-association on the day’s politics. But I suspect it was a sly intimation of the irrelevance of Christianity.
Or maybe those two possibilities amount to the same thing.
Transmogrified
[T]he Enlightenment—and, yes, we are painting with broad strokes here—did not do away with the notions of Providence, Heaven, and Grace. Rather, the Enlightenment re-framed these as Progress, Utopia, and Technology respectively. If heaven had been understood as a transcendent goal achieved with the aid of divine grace within the context of the providentially ordered unfolding of human history, it became a Utopian vision, a heaven on earth, achieved by the ministrations Science and Technology within the context of Progress, an inexorable force driving history toward its Utopian consummation.
How and where?
Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms.
The theme of the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago
I’m not sure how or in what universe such a slogan would seem uplifting.
Whited sepulchres
You look so good the slum must be inside you
Poet Tomas Tranströmer via Martin Shaw
There oughtn’t be a law
I don’t want to make an ordinance just to make an ordinance. I don’t think I’ve heard one complaint about this, ever.
A City Councilman, apparently compos mentis, regarding an ordinance to require smokers to stay 15 feet, rather than 8 feet, from building entrances.
Bare inspiration
Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind.
Johannes Brahms
Faith
What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do—especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.
Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become in the next moment.
Victor Frankl
Both quotes from Jacob Sims, A Community of Aliens, an example of why I always at least glance at new stuff from Front Porch Republic. Mr. Sims has a book out called Wanderlost, published this week.
One source of imperialism
Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism.
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Quite the wordsmith
- … Donald Trump’s post-indictment Festivus-style airing of grievances …
- One lottery ticket is gambling, two is innumeracy.
For all its piety and fervor, today’s United States needs to be recognized for what it really is: not a Christian country, but a nation of heretics.
Ross Douthat, Bad Religion
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 