Christ is Risen!
This post is kinda late because I was feasting until 7 hours ago and slept until after 8 am.
What do we know about God?
I believe that Christians make a serious mistake when we begin to speak first about God rather than first about Christ and His death on the Cross and resurrection from the dead. It is a mistake because it presumes we know something about God that is somehow “prior” to those events. We do not, or, if we think we do, we are mistaken. The death and resurrection of Christ are the alpha and the omega of God’s self-revelation to the world. Nothing in all of creation is extraneous or irrelevant to those events.
I love prayer books
No one may mock another’s form of prayer. Extempore prayers and set prayers both reach the Throne if there is any spark of desire in the one praying that they do so. God is not a literary critic or a speech teacher. He does not grade our prayers. But it is for us to realize that there is great help available for us in our prayers. Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own. The prayers of the church lead us into regions that, left to our own resources, we might never have imagined. Also, in this connection, it is worthwhile remembering that prayer is as much a matter of our learning to pray what we ought to pray, as it is expressing what we feel at given moments. The prayer of the church gives us great help here.
Tom Howard, Evangelical is Not Enough.
When, as a Reformed Elder, I occasionally had to lead worship in the Pastor’s absence, I unfailingly went to the Book of Common Prayer to structure the “Pastoral Prayer” for the morning. I did so because I didn’t want to lapse into “Father we just” (this) and “Father we just” (that), the faux fervency I heard too often.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me to use prayer books in my private prayers, but as I approached Orthodoxy, the Church’s prayers, in its Prayer Books, indeed taught me how to pray.
Gnosticism is insidious
Abigail Rine Favale echoed Mohler when she published an article in First Things in 2018 titled “Evangelical Gnosticism.” I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or home-schooling curricula. Yet an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection. While they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its “meat suit” (a term they fondly use). Upon reading Favale’s article, a Grove City professor said on Twitter, “I did not believe this was true of my students,” so he decided to poll them during class. He then announced, “I was floored (and dismayed) to discover the vast majority don’t believe in the bodily resurrection.”
Robin Phillips and Fr. Stephen De Young, Rediscovering the Good of Creation
Young, restless and …
Interesting observation from Julia Yost in the Washington Post: the blogosphere gave a relative edge to discursive Protestantism; TikTok and Instagram to liturgical Christianity. “Young, Restless and Reformed” giving way to “Young, Restless and Roman.”
Via the grapevine, I understand the Parish associated with the Roman Catholic chaplaincy at University of Illinois received 130 at Easter. My little Orthodox parish baptized five and chrismated three more. We have added the Paschal Troparion (Hymn) in Spanish as a result.
These dogs don’t hunt
Other influential myths also invite reevaluation: the memory of medieval Christendom as the “Dark Ages,” the decline narrative of the church’s “Constantinian fall,” or the dismissal of Christian orthodoxy as “Hellenized” by alien Greek philosophy.7 More work can and should be done on the legacy of these flawed narratives—notably, all reflecting anti-Catholic and antimedieval biases—in American history.
Paul Gutaker, The Old Faith in a New Nation (Epilogue)
Conundrum
Many evangelicals knew the Christian right had become deeply unpopular with most Americans and that evangelicals had become thoroughly identified with the Christian right.
Frances Fitzgerald, The Evangelicals.
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 