Many of his followers left behind — abandoned — their families to become His followers. Children left behind parents (James and John), and fathers left behind spouses and children (Peter). They believed that their world was in its last days, and that the business of raising new generations didn’t matter much.
Sure. When the church lost its purity under Rome, the ascetics went out into the desert to forge their relationships with God more or less alone. Jesus withdrew in order to pray. However, he did not stay there.
More Americans may go to church than their counterparts in Europe, but the churches to which they go do little to challenge the secular presumptions that form their lives or the lives of the churches to which they go.
Roger Martin introduced to business world readers the idea of an “opposable mind.” As a human thumb allows us to pick up stuff, so leaders must hold together the irreconcilable until some new possibility emerges. Others have written about how much Martin’s description sounds like the gospel. Christians have to affirm things in tandem that the world prefers to pull apart. Does any wing of today’s Anglican Communion have an opposable mind?
It’s been 50 years since Time carried reference to Valerie Saiving Goldstein’s groundbreaking piece “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.”
There is little more bracing for a priest than to be publicly accused of heresy – even if it is only the casual remarks of the angry and anonymous on the internet these days. So I have been pondering the charge of heresy – and, specifically, Gnosticism – leveled at me for an online reflection on chastity that was posted recently at Daily Episcopalian.
Contrary to the profoundly mistaken presumption of Dennett, LaScola, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, et al. – as well as the five clergy in their study – religious belief does not inherently entail supernaturalism. The guilt that some of the study’s participants feel from abandoning supernaturalism says more about study participants than about the possible viability of non-supernatural theology.
The Spirit’s ministry is described in nearly the same terms as that of Jesus himself, who is sent by the Father to declare the things he has seen and heard. Like Jesus, the Spirit is a faithful witness, who speaks only what belongs to Another. As Jesus puts it, he will take what is mine and declare it to you.
Perhaps it’s no mere coincidence that on a week in which preachers were sweating over how to make sense of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person of the Trinity out of their pulpits – a task that seems to turn theology into an unhappy sausage-making exercise – The Guardian asked a few theologians how to define the substance of their work.
People kept talking about faith, but it was faith in “the island” which, as nearly as I could tell was a metaphor for the island.