Monthly Archives: May 2011
The World Wide (Religious) Web for Friday, May 13, 2011
For those of you who suffer paraskevidekatriaphobia, I’d like to wish you a very happy Friday the 13th!
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I hosted a “candid conversation” between my dad, who is general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, and several young AG ministers. Four years ago, they started FutureAG.blogspot.com, which was controversial at the time. Anyway, I thought the conversation was interesting. Here’s the video:
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PrayforHuckabee.com raises a Rob Bell-like theological question: As Gov. Mike Huckabee contemplates running for president, he wants us to pray for him. “Pray that I will hear the still, small voice of the Holy Spirit as He leads my steps according to His will.” Which raises the question: “Does God always get what God wants?” If God wants Huckabee to run for president, will Huckabee win the Republican primaries? If Huckabee wins the primaries, will he win the election? If he doesn’t, has God’s will been thwarted?
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“How big a stumbling block will Newt Gingrich’s three marriages and admission of an affair pose to his efforts to win so-called values voters?” My guess: Big in the primaries, but small in the general election. On a related note, Eboo Patel wonders whether “a Catholic running against Islam”—such as Gingrich—recognizes the irony of what he’s doing.
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Stephen Prothero asks a tough question about American Christian attitudes toward Osama bin Laden: “How Christian can a country be if even Bible believers cannot get behind something as basic to the Bible as the golden rule? Is Jesus really the lord of your life if his ‘hard teachings’ can be so blithely ignored?” Ouch.
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The Catholic University of America has invited Speaker John Boehner to deliver its commencement address this year, an invitation that has caused controversy. Some CUA academics are not pleased.
Mr. Speaker, your voting record is at variance from one of the Church’s most ancient moral teachings. From the apostles to the present, the Magisterium of the Church has insisted that those in power are morally obliged to preference the needs of the poor. Your record in support of legislation to address the desperate needs of the poor is among the worst in Congress. This fundamental concern should have great urgency for Catholic policy makers. Yet, even now, you work in opposition to it.
But Rev. Robert Sirico thinks Boehner’s critics are confused.
Question: Is the Welfare State a necessary means to accomplish the end of meeting the needs of the poor? If the answer is yes, then Boehner’s critics have a point. If the answer is no, then Sirico is right when he says of House Republicans, “they simply reflect a different, and in many people’s estimation, more accurate and economically-informed way, of proposing how we achieve worthy goals.”
In this vein, check out “Rethinking Redistribution” by Jeffrey A. Miron and “Beyond the Welfare State” by Yuval Levin. You might also want to look at John Cogan’s “The Millionaire Retirees Next Door,” which argues, “Typical retired couples will collect $1 million or more in Social Security and Medicare. This is more than they paid in, and the cost will fall on today’s workers.”
For me, the question is now whether to help the poor but how. I don’t believe that our current Welfare State is sustainable.
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Did the PCUSA decide to ordain LGBTQ folk, or did it decide to drop the “chastity in singleness” requirement for ordination? GetReligion.org explains. On a related note: “The momentum of the gay clergy movement, however, may soon grind to a halt.”
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“Navy reverses itself on gay marriages on military bases.”
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“Beyond ‘Religious’ and ‘Secular’”:
Whatever one makes of them individually, however, Sorek and Picard, along with Sephardi figures like Meir Buzaglo, recognize just how crabbed and constricting the categories of “religious” and “secular” truly are, and are trying from different directions to think through Israel’s current cultural impasse and beyond the tired and destructive religious status quo. They thus present a bracing challenge to self-described religious and secular alike, and a daring demand to grasp the responsibility for the Jewish past and future that comes with living in freedom in the Jewish state.
Could America benefit from a similar “thinking through”?
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The Christian Science Monitor is publishing an interesting five-part series, “Religion, Politics & the Public Space.”
- “Why ‘God is personal, never private”
- “What can rescue the Arab spring?”
- “Iran’s spiritual leader isn’t a hardline Islamist, but a mystic poet”
- “Abuse of Muslims shows equality is still an open question in Europe”
- “A revolutionary development: Religions are speaking in common tongues”
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“Sects, Love, and Rock & Roll”: a history of Christian rock music. There’s also a book.
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Imagine an institution that requires its leaders to attend not only college, but graduate school. Imagine that the graduate school in question is constitutionally forbidden from receiving any form of government aid, that it typically requires three years of full-time schooling for the diploma, that the nature of the schooling bears almost no resemblance to the job in question, and that the pay for graduates is far lower than other professions. You have just imagined the relationship between the Christian Church and her seminaries.
Yowzer! Here’s Part 2, which has lots of good links to online theological resources. My seminaries (Fuller, AGTS) seem to do a better job of preparing people for ministry.
Candid Conversation with Future AG Bloggers
I hosted a “candid conversation” between my dad, who is general superintendent of the Assemblies of God, and several young AG ministers. Four years ago, they started FutureAG.blogspot.com, which was controversial at the time. Anyway, I thought the conversation was interesting.
The World Wide (Religious) Web for Thursday, May 12, 2011
What is the gospel? Dallas Willard’s answer: “How to get into heaven before you die.”
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A Leap of Truth explores the relationship between Christian theology and evolutionary theory.
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Allen C. Guelzo asks, “Whither the Evangelical Colleges?” Hunter Baker replies with a thither.
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“Presbyterian Church to ordain gays as ministers.” The Rev. Dr. Janet Edwards, a Presbyterian minister, considers this a “moral awakening.”Mark Chaves, a sociologist of religion at Duke University, comments: “They’re making this change amid a larger cultural change. General public opinion on gay rights is trending pretty dramatically in the liberal direction.” On a (cor)related (but not necessarily caused) note, mainline church attendance is tanking. Perhaps this illustrates the truth of W. R. Inge’s comment that those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves a widower in the next.
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“Catholic Church should reverse opposition to in vitro fertilization.” What’s interesting about this story is that the author, Sean Savage, and his wife, Carolyn, used IVF. Due to a lab mistake, she was implanted with the wrong embryo. Incredibly, she not only gave birth to the child but also gave the boy back to his biological parents. Sean and Carolyn tell their story in Inconceivable: A Medical Mistake, the Baby We Couldn’t Keep, and Our Choice to Deliver the Ultimate Gift.
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Robert H. Gundry on “The Hopelessness of the Unevangelized.”
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Just what we need: Yet another English translation of the Bible. And does anyone else find it odd that a graduate school—my alma mater—prefers a translation “written at the seventh or eighth grade reading level”?
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“Scientology in Illinois’ public schools?” Only in Springfield would L. Ron Hubbard and Bart Simpson make common cause.
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“Adolescents, Identity and Spirituality.” Something for parents to keep in mind:
While adolescents may question or review their spirituality, it remains a critical aspect of adolescent stability. While research on spirituality and adolescence is limited, studies of religiosity have found a positive correlation with an adolescent sense of well-being, positive life attitudes, altruism, resiliency, school success, health and positive identity, as well as a negative correlation with alcohol and drug use, delinquency, depression, excessive risk-taking and early sexual activity.
In short, as adolescents develop, they will need to confront their own spirituality and incorporate it into their sense of identity. Continuing the dialog while respecting that process and acknowledging the quest may be difficult. Yet it really remains the only option.
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Is Buddhist pacifism a Western myth?
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Over at Patheos.com, J. E. Dyer pens these words in “Social Conservatism and the Quality of Mercy”:
The moral horizon of our society has been narrowing for some time to a closed equation featuring selfish vindication and death, and it is this process that only God and His concept of mercy can reverse. If Christians are “salt and light” in the earth, as Jesus said we would be, then we cannot do better, in the project of propagating God’s mercy, than to start by absorbing its meaning ourselves.
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“Black Preacher: Why I forgave George Wallace”: Because George Wallace needed forgiveness? According to the Rev. Kelvin Croom, “If a lot of us would forgive people, we could find healing. We could find peace.” Another path to peace would be if a lot of us would repent of our sins against others.
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A little bit of philosophical theology in closing: How do we reconcile the social ought with the personal good? Thaddeus J. Kozinski answers:
The phenomenological dialectic of right and good could be resolved if we could understand what is at the heart of human moral experience; but to understand this heart, we require more than what, unaided, human moral experience and purely philosophical speculation on this experience can provide. My argument for this conclusion is thus: What the duty aspect of moral experience suggests is the reality of justice, which is inherently relational and thus irreducible to any interpretation of morality as mere personal fulfillment. What the happiness aspect of moral experience suggests is the reality of desire-for-the-good, which is inherently personal and thus irreducible to an interpretation of morality as mere social or divine obligation. So, any explanation of the moral ought must include both others-related justice and self-related desire, and this is precisely what is provided by a theological ethics of creation and gift: If we are creatures, then we are inherently relational, with any actions related, above all, to our creator; and if creation is a gift, then we are supposed to enjoy creation as a good. And if God Himself, in essence, is a relation of three persons eternally bestowing upon each other and enjoying each other’s perfect divine goodness—God giving and receiving Himself—and if humans are made in the image and likeness of this Trinitarian gift-friendship, then we have the definitive—though still inexhaustibly mysterious—archetype in which the paradoxical human experience of simultaneous goodness and oughtness can ultimately be resolved.
You might also want to check out Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality by David Baggett and Jerry L. Walls.
Shallow Small Group Bible Study
“And spiritual growth? Who wants spiritual growth! I had a growth removed last week. It wasn’t pleasant.”
The World Wide (Religious) Web for Wednesday, May 11, 2011
In America, crazy people accuse the president of being foreign born. In Iran, crazy people charge Ahmadinejad allies with sorcery. In America, the crazy people are on the political fringe. In Iran, the crazy people are the ones in charge.
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“Is Osama bin Laden in heaven?” A thought experiment from Kyle Roberts.
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Do Tiger Mothers raise Black Swans? And more questions from Timothy Dalrymple:
What do we really want for our children: Perfect technical execution, or creative transcendence? Lives of mechanical achievement, or of rich passions and personalities? Do we encourage a healthy growth into sociality and sexuality, or stamp them out in order to focus our children on their professional pursuits? To what extent are our children liberated by our stories, and to what extent are they haunted by our own unfulfilled dreams? And when does the striving for perfection and achievement become less a vision that inspires a joyful labor than a Law that enslaves and drives us to self-loathing?
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“Leading atheist publishes secular Bible.” I think it’s safe to assume that The Good Book is neither inspired nor inerrant.
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“Is Heavenly Mother Making a Comeback in Mormonism?”
(a) I didn’t know Mormonism had a Heavenly Mother.
(2) Joanna Brooks, who authored this article, quotes Eliza R. Snow, who wrote a hymn with the lyric:
In the heavens are parents single?
No, the thought makes reason stare!
Truth is reason, truth eternal
Tells me I’ve a mother there.
Third, Eliza’s younger brother, Lorenzo Snow, was 5th president of the Latter Day Saints. He said: “As man is, God once was; as God is, man may become.”
Interesting.
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“The allegations that religious Jews denigrate women or do not respect women in public office is a malicious slander and libel.” Then why did your paper PhotoShop the two women—and only them–out of that famous situation room photo.
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Church, state, and anti-Semitism: “In her captivating narrative [Sinners on Trial], [Magda] Teter has painstakingly documented how the body politic and the body of Christ were inextricably bound together through the early modern period, and how the Reformation not only failed to diminish the host-desecration calumny but, at least in Catholic Poland, gave it new energy.” This review is a good reminder of the ironies of history, for example, how a Jewish “sect” morphed into an [at times] anti-Semitic religion, and how the Protestant Reformation, rather than reforming this anti-Semitism, made it worse, at least in some places.
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“Navy plan to allow same-sex marriage on bases draws opposition.”
(a) Of course the Navy is the first service to do this. The Village People didn’t sing about the Army, after all.
(2) Joe Carter thinks “may” will become “must at some point.
Third, I’m reminded of Neuhaus’ Law: “Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.”
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To plant churches or to parent them? In the Assemblies of God, we do both, with generally good results.
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Over at Patheos.com, Mark D. Roberts has concluded a four-part series, “The Loneliness of Pastoring.”
- A pastor’s suicide points to how deeply lonely the pastoring experience can be
- Does the professionalization of ministry lead to pastoral loneliness?
- Pastoring is a lonely business. But pastors don’t have to be — and shouldn’t be — as lonely as they often are.
- What relationships are essential for every pastor?
The Fruit of the Spirit
My dad spoke this morning at AGHQ chapel about the fruit of the Spirit. Here’s the video…
The Fruit of the Spirit, posted with vodpod
The World Wide (Religious) Web for Tuesday, May 10, 2011
Make sure to watch it all the way through. And read the credits; they’re hilarious.
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“Egypt in crisis talks after Muslim mobs attack Christian churches” or “12 dead in Egypt as Christians and Muslims clash”? GetReligion.org tries to sort out the facts.
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Is a bad marriage better than a good divorce? “Social scientists are concealing the harm that divorce, single parenting and stepfamilies do to children. Not only that, they are also hiding the benefits which even unhappy marriages bestow, not just on children, but on the couples involved.”
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Is a national curriculum a good idea? “National control over curriculum creates a single lever you can pull to move every school in America. Would conservatives trust progressives, and would progressives trust conservatives, not to try to seize control of that lever to inculcate their religious and moral views among the nation’s youth? And if you don’t trust the other side not to try to seize the lever, is there any reasonable alternative to trying to seize it first?”
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In “Europe’s Concerned, Worried, and Doubting,” David Mills reflects on the differences between European and American reactions to the death of Osama bin Laden.
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California college adds major in secularism. Of course, on many college campuses today, students get a minor in it already, though without knowing it.
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“How Christianity and capitalism can ‘heal’ the world.” An interesting article about “social investing.” Theologically, however, I’d prefer to delete –ity and capitalism from the title.
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“LGBT ‘Welcome’ Ad Rejected by Sojourners, Nation’s Premier Progressive Christian Org.” I’m on the opposite side of the issues from Rev. Robert Chase, but I too wonder how a Christian magazine can avoid taking sides on this issue.
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In “Judas,” Lady Gaga goes clubbing with Jesus, who’s a Latin biker, and… Oh, who cares! There’s no “shock value” in this video, only “shlock value.”
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In closing, and a bit more reverentially, Carrie Underwood and Vince Gil shine on this country rendition of “How Great Thou Art”:
I totally want to go to whatever church these two provide “special music” for.
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P.S. Shameless self-promotion: Check out my article in Enrichment: “Up There, Down Here, Among Us, In Me.” It’s about praying for God’s kingdom.
The World Wide (Religious) Web for Monday, May 9, 2011
This year is the 400th anniversary of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. Over at ChristianityToday.com, Mark A. Noll asks, “What would it have been like if the KJV had always been only one among several competing English-language versions of the Bible?”His answer:
When the KJV became the cultural and literary standard for the entire English-speaking world, it was easier to focus on the literary excellence of the translation without stopping to face the divine imperatives and promises that are any Bible’s primary reason for existence. The pervasive cultural presence of this Bible also made it easy to exploit scriptural words, phrases, images, and allusions for their evocative power, even when those uses contradicted the Bible’s basic spiritual meaning.
Yet even soberly considered, the immense good accomplished in and through the KJV is a marvel. When the KJV became the cultural and literary standard for the entire English-speaking world, the spiritual impact of the Bible was certainly enhanced because the scriptural message was carried far and wide via an all-pervasive cultural standard. The substance of divine revelation that lay immediately beneath the words of the KJV could also exert a dramatic public impact for good, precisely because this translation so dominated the English-speaking world.
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Over at Patheos.com, John Fea concludes an excellent four-part series on the Civil War as a war between two “Christian nations.”
- Part 1: “One Nation, Under God, Indivisible”
- Part 2: “God’s Judgment Upon the South”
- Part 3: “The Confederacy’s “Christian Nation”
- Part 4: “A Slaveholding Nation is a Christian Nation”
Fea’s conclusion is worth keeping in mind when you hear talk about America as a “Christian nation”:
As we’ve seen over the past four columns, by 1860 there were two visions of Christian America. Many Northerners believed that the national Union was sacred because it was created and blessed by God. Many Southerners argued that the Confederate States of America was a Christian nation because the Bible’s teachings were compatible with a southern way of life.
Throughout American history there was seldom a common understanding of what it meant to be a Christian nation. The Civil War is merely one example. This is certainly something to remember whenever we get the urge to talk about America’s so-called Christian roots.
If you like what you read, check out Fea’s America as a Christian Nation: A Historical Introduction.
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C. S. Lewis on Evolution and Intelligent Design.
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The Arts & Faith Top 100 Films does not include The Mission but it does include The Story of the Weeping Camel. Something’s seriously wrong with this list.
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Who is the devil like? David Bentley Hart offers these thoughts:
- “the sort of person you try your best to get away from at a party”
- “A merciless real estate developer whose largest projects are all casinos.”
- “Donald Trump—though perhaps just a little nicer”
Ouch. And, heh.
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“Faith unshaken by tornado.” Well, yeah. Psalm 46:1–3.
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“Bin Laden’s theology a radical break with traditional Islam.” That’s both true and good to know, although Mollie Hemingway has some questions.
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“Every saint has a past and every sinner has a future.” There Be Dragons, a new film about Opus Dei founder Josemaría Escrivá, gets a good review from Cathleen Falsani Possley.
