Imagine you are offered a trustworthy opportunity for immortality in which your mind (perhaps also your body) will persist eternally. Would you take it? Metaphysician and former British diplomat Stephen Cave thinks accepting such an offer would be a bad idea.
The problem of evil is instead an opportunity to explore my enmeshment in systems bigger than myself, to investigate the ways I am complicit in others’ pain and suffering even when I think I’m innocent, and to lament with God the pain that causes God, them, and me. Evil is cosmic, social, and personal in that order.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori believes that the sacraments of communion and baptism should not be separated. At a townhall meeting in North Carolina a
… scholars on the right and left increasingly say that comforting belief in an afterlife has no basis in the Bible and would have sounded bizarre to Jesus and his early followers.
When President Obama endorsed same-sex marriage this week, he cited his faith, and this highlighted the fact that different Christians read the same Bible differently and see different implications. The Rev. Canon Susan Russel talked about this on NPR’s Morning Edition today.
Bosco Peters on Liturgy points us to a fascinating lecture by Fr. John Behr, Dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary in New York. Behr believes that the early church communities that were the most diverse–catholic–were what came to be known as orthodox.
…women tend to have a 27% lower salary than men, 90% of the lead women pastors are the first woman in such a position in their congregation, 69% of the women are married compared with 99% of the male pastors, 25% of the lead women pastors report some form of physical threat. ~UMC study
Jonathan Tran reviews three books that he says redefine both black theology and challenges many assumptions white theologians hold about the relationship between race and the theological enterprise.
But is Constantinianism entirely wrongheaded? Don’t Christians want people in power to embrace Christianity and Christian values? Is it a bad thing if they do? Is it impossible or meaningless for them to try?
There’s a well known saying that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith, certainty is. (It’s generally attributed to Anne Lamott, but there are versions traced