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After Solomon built the Temple, or rather, after his laborers built
it, he stood and offered a prayer for its dedication. In his prayer, he
admitted that the Temple, for all its human splendor, could not contain
or limit God.
You meet interesting people at high school football games. When the
game is delayed for two hours because of thunder and lightening you can
really get to know them. At least, that was my experience last Friday
night at South-Doyle High School.
The title of this post is intentionally provocative. It reverses the
similarity that some conservative religious believers (and some atheists) will at times use polemically, claiming that liberal believers are, for all practical purposes, no different from atheists.
Thursday morning, I drove over to a neighboring parish to participate in Lectio Divina for the first time.
I don't know why I haven't done it before. In the back of my mind, I
knew that the pastor hosted a Lectio group for a few years. And for at
least a few years, I've wanted to learn more about divine reading.
Summer sermons in our community have been
focused on the parables and sayings of Jesus. I’ve not been present
for the whole series, but have enjoyed the challenge of preaching from
these bracing, disorienting, reorienting stories over the last few
weeks.
A
commenter on a recent post mentioned the experience of highlighting
substantial parts of a work by Nietzsche while working on an essay.
Years later, he found the text and tried reading those parts he hadn’t
highlighted, to see what was in the sections that he didn’t find significant at the time. He then went on to ask if a similar experiment has ever been done with the Bible.
This Sunday's New York Times magazine's cover article is about "two-minus-one" pregnancies—pregnancies with twins in which the mother decides to request selective reduction, that is, to abort one of the fetuses so that she only gives birth to one baby.
Recently, Bill Hybels responded to a gay activist group which had circulated a petition calling for the CEO of Starbucks to cancel his scheduled talk as part of the annual Willow Creek Association Leadership Summit. The CEO ended up not speaking at the event, and Bill Hybels explained the situation to the summit participants.
I’m always intrigued when I’m reminded of some of the background stories (context) behind the actual words of the Bible. John’s famous line “God is love” was born of out of a messy leadership conflict (1 John 4:8). Paul’s unifying dictum “you are all one in Christ” addressed social and racial tensions (Gal. 3:28).
It’s become a historical cliché that without the printing press, the Protestant Reformation would likely not have gotten off the ground. It’s not that the printing press caused the Reformation. Rather, the printing press not only allowed for the spread of Protestant ideas, but also allowed for a shift in power, from entrenched Church leadership to the layperson.
