As I said the words and moved my hand in the familiar shape of the cross, something caught my eye. One of the first grade boys seated in the second row was moving his arm with mine. His face was scrunched in concentration, his little fingers shaped just as mine were, his arm also tracing the shape of the cross through the air. He was mimicking me.
The authors of the New Testament were very much like the scribes who would later transmit those authors’ writings. The authors too were human beings with needs, beliefs, worldviews, opinions, loves, hates, longings, desires, situations, problems—and surely all these things affected what they wrote.
The redoubtable Bosco Peters has launched a new feature on his blog that deserves attention for both its name and its flinty sense of humor.
Slate is carrying hymns of praise to Café favorites Bull Durham, and Friday Night Lights. Perhaps it is only coincidence, but we prefer to think it is a manifestation of our vast influence over public discourse.
Doesn’t the Presiding Bishop remind you of Ronald Reagan? Not, obviously, in her politics, but in her ability to work through the media to amplify her message. Here are a collection of recent articles.
“Our primary work right now is caring for the people in the Seabury community whose lives are being dramatically disrupted,” Dean Gary Hall said. “While we need to look to what Seabury might become in the future, we have focused almost all of our energies on the immediate concerns facing those around us.”
Christ Church in Philadelphia is in the midst of a public examination of its slave-holding past, and plans “regular dramatic enactments of slaves and slaveholders, Founding Fathers and chattel, and slave-owning abolitionists.” The presentations are scheduled to begin May 1.
The Archbishops of Canterbury and York have issued a joint statement this morning concerning the deteriorating situation of ordinary people in Zimbabwe calling for “a civil society movement that both gives voice to those who demand an end to the mayhem that grows out of injustice, poverty, exclusion and violence.”
The Kenyan and Rwandan archbishops each support breakaway congregations in the United States. Neither will take Communion with Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori of the Episcopal Church. Yet, there they were at Archbishop Deng Bul’s consecration with representatives of the Episcopal Church. This is all to the good, but it raises certain questions.
My ethical problem with justifying the execution of one individual to deter other persons from committing crimes is that this reduces the one executed to a means to an end, thereby denying that person’s inherent dignity and worth as a child of God. Christians should never view a person as simply an instrument for achieving a goal, no matter how laudable the goal.