I’m not just resolving to “be healthy”, I’m resolving some specific things: to buy organic food whenever possible, to buy local food whenever possible, to eat my five servings of fruits and veggies daily, and to exercise at least three times a week. So far so good, but now—what about my spiritual health? Doesn’t it require just as much nurture as my physical health?
Last year the National Geographic announced a new second century manuscript, Gospel of Judas Iscariot, that reportedly claimed that Judas didn’t betray Jesus. Instead, Jesus asked Judas, his most trusted and beloved disciple, to hand him over to be killed. In yesterday’s New York Times, April D. DeConick, a professor of Biblical studies at Rice University, and the author of The Thirteenth Apostle: What the Gospel of Judas Really Says, has an op-ed that argues that the translation of the Gospel was wrong
Mark Silva of The Baltimore Sun writes: For a presidential contest in which religion – and indeed the religious faith of at least one candidate – will play a certain role in the choices which many voters make, two questions loom large here: Is every word in the Bible true, and “what would Jesus do’’ about capital punishment.
No one can say, “It says in the Scripture,” to ground any policy, all we can say is, “My community says this,” says Rabbi Steven Greenburg, who tackles the most common religious rationales forbidding same-sex relationships.
Writer A. J. Jacobs spent a year taking the Bible very, very seriously, and chronicling his experience in a new book, The Year of Living
I looked at how the discussion had descended into diatribe and distraction, and I suddenly wondered what I was to do. Should I put my two cents in? If I did, would I be associating myself with the intemperance of the intemperate responders? Should I refrain, and allow both the assertions of the gadfly and the virulence of the intemperate to stand unchallenged?
Psalm 119 is long. It is repetitious. But these are the qualities that invite us into a spirit of contemplation. It issues an invitation to dive into the Word and—yes—into the Law, to roll ourselves in it, to lose and loose ourselves within its depth and breadth and height and width. To find hope. To find delight.
Studies show in fact that story-telling is the most effective way of communicating a complex of ideas – about truth, about culture, about expectation, about social norms, about values – to any person or group of people. Anybody who has heard a good sermon, seen a good play, or heard a great ballad understands this.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.
Just a century ago, in all of Africa, there were merely ten million Christians. But, lest we assume the Bible is a novelty in Africa, we must remember that Africans have been engaging the Word of God in the Bible for millennia.