Lofty Tree, bend down your branches
To embrace your sacred load:
Oh, relax the native tension
Of that all too rigid wood;
Gently, gently bear the members
Of your dying King and God.
You are opposed to telling Africans that condoms “increase the problem” of HIV/Aids. You are opposed to labelling gay people “evil”. The vast majority of you, if you witnessed any of these acts, would be disgusted, and speak out. Yet over the next fortnight, many of you will nonetheless turn out to cheer for a Pope who has unrepentantly done all these things.
Last Monday we asked how preachers around the church had handled the difficult Gospel passage on hating your mother and your father. This week I’d like to ask a broader question: what passages–particularly Gospel passages–do you find hardest to preach on? Why? And what do you do about it?
Historical comparisons are bound to be inexact; but American Muslims, like American Catholics, are now building their own religious and cultural institutions, and they are seeking guidance from a wide variety of religious sources—some few from jihadists, most from accommodationists.
Wherefore we have need of zeal in every direction, and much preparation of mind: and if we so order our conscience as to hate our former wickedness, and choose the contrary path with as much energy as God desires and commands, we shall not have anything less on account of the short space of time:
Newman, in Tracts for Our Times, made a lengthy case that the Church of England was an ancient, valid Catholic Church and Rome was corrupt, deficient, and schismatic in part because of its magnetic attraction to papal power. But much later in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua and other writings, Newman deftly avoided most of the sharp criticisms of Rome he had made earlier in the Tracts.
I believe in thee, O Lord, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, one only true God. I believe that all things were created by thy Almighty power and love: That all have been restored, by the goodness and mercy exhibited in the person of thy Word, the Lord Jesus Christ; who for us men, and for our salvation, was made flesh, conceived and born, did suffer, and was crucified, descended into the place of departed spirits,
The plantation songs known as “spirituals” are the spontaneous outbursts of intense religious fervor, and had their origin chiefly in camp meetings, revivals and other religious exercises. They were never “composed,” but sprang into life, ready made, from the white heat of religious fervor during some protracted meeting in camp or church, as the simple, ecstatic utterance of wholly untutored minds, and are practically the only music in America which meets the scientific definition of Folk Song.
The point of the report seemed pretty clear to me: it attempted to demonstrate that human religion began as simple—and simplistic—means of social control. The unspoken but seemly logical conclusion was that since humanity had moved past the need for such primitive controls, it was time for us to move beyond religion as well.
The application of this truth to the interests and destiny of the colored race of America is manifest. We are living in this country, a part of its population, and yet, in divers respects, we are as foreign to its inhabitants as though we were living in the Sandwich Islands. It is this our natural separation from the real life of the nation, which constitutes us “a nation within a nation”: