The story of the woman anointing the head of Jesus with precious ointment is yet another story of conflict. The woman is immediately despised for her action. The indignant critics condemn her for senseless waste: that stuff of hers should have been donated for the relief of the poor instead of being emptied over Jesus’ head.
In some sense, the outrage about according a degree of official status to Shariah in a Western country should come as no surprise. No legal system has ever had worse press. To many, the word “Shariah” conjures horrors of hands cut off, adulterers stoned and women oppressed. In fact, for most of its history, Islamic law offered the most liberal and humane legal principles available anywhere in the world.
As Christians in most of the world approach the celebration of Jesus’ Resurrection, it is startling to find three distinguished scholars, all known for scrupulous attention to theological tradition and biblical sources, agreeing that the very idea of resurrection is widely and badly misunderstood.
Painting by Taylor Harbison, essay by the Rev. Michael Sullivan
A recent study presented at American Heart Association’s 48th Annual Conference on Cardiovascular Disease Epidemiology and Prevention confirms what many parents already know:. Teens are spending a lot of time online and in front of the television.
When it comes to a larger and historically more important subject like Lincoln’s religion, the problems only ramify. We know that Lincoln attended a Baptist church with his parents as a boy in Kentucky and Indiana, because some church records survive. But from there his religious identity fragments in the conflicting testimony of those who knew him.
It seems to me that if we are going to make sense out of Jesus’ silence, if we claim any right to play at the empty tomb on Easter morning, we need to remember his companions in suffering. We cannot in good faith re-encounter the silence of Jesus in these latter days without encountering the silence of the victims who came after him.
https://episcopal.cafe/video/holythursday.jpg
The cross is the exhibition of Life being precisely that; more—as knowing itself to be precisely that, as experiencing itself as being precisely that. We are relieved—may one say?—from the burden of being naturally optimistic.
Maggi Dawn points us to a piece in the Guardian Review in which British author and philosopher John N. Gray examines the popularity of the “New Atheists” —same as the old atheists, he adds, examining the motivations of “secular fundamentalists.” He scrutinizes the positions of authors such as Dawkins and Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Martin Amis, Michel Onfray, Philip Pullman and other authors, and provides some historical perspective on what exactly tends to happen when religion is actively suppressed.