A blessed Easter to readers in Western Christian traditions like the wife sitting four feet from me as I type (who, to the best of my knowledge, doesn’t read this blog). Blessed is He that comes in the Name of the Lord to readers in Eastern Christian traditions.
Mystical pilgrimage
There is a deeper pilgrimage that the Church encourages and is available to all. It has no commercialism, nor is it fraught with temptation. It is quite simple:
The whole world is Passover in Jerusalem in 33 A.D. Everywhere we go, we are there. In the liturgical life of the Church, the details of that city, at that time, are drawn out in careful detail in the services of Holy Week. Every celebration of the Divine Liturgy is a making-present of that time and that place.
…
This pilgrimage is not an act of imagination. That which is truly “mystical” is not imaginary – it is real and true.
The Orthodox Church is entering Holy Week, and I feared that this post was too oblivious to that. Then Fr. Stephen came through for me. If you read nothing else, click the link to read his thoughts on pilgrimage.
On the construct of “religion”
To ask a census-taker how many Chinese are Buddhist is rather like asking one how many Westerners are Aristotelian or pragmatist.
William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence
Why might a doctrinal conservative be an Episcopalian?
The reader will reasonably ask why I became an Episcopalian when I don’t like progressive theology. One reason is, of course, family. Another is my longstanding love of Anglican choral music and of the cadences in the Book of Common Prayer (even in most post-1662 versions), neither of which can, in my view, be matched by any other Christian tradition in English.
I, self-confessed homo adorans, cannot despise that position. I wonder how many Episcopalians quietly reject the progressive theology, staying for the worship. I have even seen retired conservative protestant pastor who moved to the Episcopal Church.
Religion and Politics
Q: So how would you respond to one of those editors responsible for hiring and firing who says “Look: the big story here is obviously the big decline of Christianity in terms of participation. Why do I spend money on a Religion Beat desk when it’s a subject that’s declining in relevance?
A: Well, see, the problem is that relevance then is defined primarily in terms of politics. “Name me some big headlines out of this.” Well, by definition a big headline is something related to Donald Trump. Politics. The mid-term elections. “Will Latino Evangelicals help Republicans again?” If your religion is politics, you’re not going to be able to justify a reporter spending six months digging deep, diving into, the statistics on confession, marriages, baptisms … what congregations are producing priests, nuns, pastors, clergy, etc. …?” That’s not going to get you big headline about American politics.
Todd Wilkins and Terry Mattingly, The story that will not die: REVIVAL in America! (GetReligion podcast)
This touches a recurring theme of their podcast series (named after the admission by a New York Times editor that his paper “just doesn’t get religion”): religion is a guise for politics according to essentially every newsroom in America. Politics is real, religion not so much.
But I have a complementary theory: religion is a guise for politics according to the revealed preferences of hundreds of thousands of churches, too. This feels like one of those things I just can’t un-see, having seen it once.
The Orthodox Church has people with strong political preferences — but not remotely homogenous, in my limited experience, and their obsessions are not the Church’s devotions.
None of this undermines the truth of the Christian Gospel, but corruptio optima pessima.
Another thing I cannot un-see
Because of the way Reformed and literal interpretations of the Bible had empowered ordinary people and their leaders in creating a Christian civilization, that hermeneutic enjoyed immense implicit authority. An obvious problem by the late 1850s, however, was that this wonderfully energizing use of Scripture had created multiple, conflicting Christian civilizations. … The Reformed, literal hermeneutic had helped build a biblical civilization—actually, two biblical civilizations. But the hermeneutic itself could not reconcile the divergent interpretations it had produced.
Mark A. Noll, America’s God
The Beatitudes, tell us the way blessedness works. I’ll take that over political “strength,” “force,” or “power” any day of the week, not just Sundays.
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real and it has no-algorithms). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 