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Friday, 03 September 2010

  • Seeing Persons, Not People

    By Brent at GodlySheep

    Standing in the middle of a Best Buy, I found myself stuck in a mental battle to approach a stranger and offer a portion of my knowledge base that no one asked for, or avoid awkwardness and not say a thing.

    I watched another customer as he asked a Best Buy employee to fetch an iPod Touch from its locked storage under the display. My window of opportunity was closing as I became a machine of reasoning indecision.

    See, that was Saturday, and I knew Apple would be announcing new iPods with new features the next week. I knew he had no idea that he was about to spend several hundred dollars on an item that would be obsolete in just a few days. 

    More Here...
  • The Parable of the Sower

    The reading from scripture to get things started is from Matthew 13:3-23

    Then he told them many things in parables, saying: "A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. He who has ears, let him hear."

     The disciples came to him and asked, "Why do you speak to the people in parables?"

     He replied, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of heaven has been given to you, but not to them. Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. This is why I speak to them in parables:
       "Though seeing, they do not see;
          though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah:
       " 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding;
          you will be ever seeing but never perceiving.

    More Here...
  • Like It or Not, We Are All His Sheep

    When I saw this photo of the nuns in the picture above, it made me think about myself and how I view others who are lost. As I pondered the answer to this question, it became very clear to me that I could do better in this respect.

    We are what we speak most of the time, and it's important for us to speak compassion, acceptance and love. Now, don't get it twisted and confused. What I'm talking about here is how we really feel about those who are lost and in need of God's guidance.

    You see, it's easy to witness to those who are open to being witnessed too. But our quest should be one that endeavors to labor among the lost. Christians are charged to love those who are difficult to love. It's no feat to love someone who likes you. However, loving someone who doesn't know Jesus or who doesn't like you is a different story. And mind you, we can't expect to enter into the gates of heaven flaunting a limited list of hand picked individuals, who we discriminately chose to pray for. More Here...

Thursday, 02 September 2010

  • How To Be Secular In A Secular Age

    I am beginning to work on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.  I say 'work' very intentionally because this is a monumental work that will probably be remembered as Taylor's magnum opus.  It developed out of his 2007 Gifford Lectures and transmuted into a 900-page book that without its dust jacket could easily be mistaken for the collected works of J.R.R. Tolkien.  But I'm not the only one who has worked at this.  Taylor (as always) is a laborious, meticulous thinker and cataloger of thoughts.  If the reader rejects his telling or his conclusions, it won't be because Taylor missed a step.  So from the very introduction, Taylor begins working on answering the question, "What do we mean by secular here?"  

    For our part, the question might be, how could you possibly consider America a secular nation when every President since Ronald Reagan has ended every speech with, "And God bless America?"  

    Taylor identifies two common meanings for the term, which he uses to isolate the uncommon meaning that he is working with.  

    The first common meaning is used in terms of "public spaces."  Taylor says that these spaces have (allegedly) been "emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimately reality.  Or taken from another side, as we function within various spheres of activity - economic, political, cultural, educational, professional, recreational - the norms and principles we follow, the deliberations we engage in, generally don't refer us to God or to any religious beliefs; the considerations we act on are internal to the 'rationality' of each sphere - maximum gain within the economy, the greatest benefit to the greatest number in the political arena, and so on." More Here...

  • Christianity Isn't a Religion, It's a Relationship: Sloganized Christianity (Part Three)

    Christianity isn’t a religion; it’s a relationship. This is, perhaps, the most common naïve Christian slogan. I consider it naïve for two reasons. First, because it is not true, and second, because while it is used to counter one valid problem, it implies a view of the Church which is just as large of a problem.

    When Christians claim that Christianity is a relationship and not a religion, they intend to distance it from cold ritualism. I agree with this sentiment wholeheartedly. Performing a service for the mere sake of performing a service, or saying a prayer merely for sake of saying a prayer are both wrong and ought to be avoided. Worse yet is for a man to perform a service or say prayer for the sake of convincing himself that he is not a bad man, or for assuming that these acts prove his goodness and allow him to stand before God. The purpose of our services and our prayers is to both worship God and be edified in our pursuit of Him; our righteousness before God is Christ alone, not anything of ourselves.

    The trouble, then, is not the sentiment of the statement. The trouble is the statement. My copy of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines religion in the following words.

    Religion: 1) the service and worship of God or the supernatural; 2) a personal set or institutionalized system of religious attitudes, beliefs, and practices.

    Clearly, the dictionary entry contained more than those first two definitions, but none of the other definitions could be construed in any way that would disqualify Christianity as a religion. Christianity is and always will be a religion. More Here...

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  • Lessons From a Car Mechanic

    By Justin at BeDeviant

    I dropped off our not-so-trusty Vue today at our local mechanic.

    “I know something’s wrong,” I said. ”We’ll take a look at it,” was the reply.

    Look, they did.

    They did so much looking, they needed to look at it overnight. “FREE LOANER!” I celebrated silently to myself. (It’s the little things.)

    This particular body shop has a deal with a car rental place down the street. I dropped off my keys with the front desk and waited as one of the staff came around the front with a shuttle van to take me to the rental place.

    I hopped in the shuttle and we began to make small talk for the short, five-minute drive down the street. The drive was short, but the conversation with my driver, Wade, was long enough to give me pause. More Here...

  • Religion as a Human Reflex

    By Sharon at SheWorships

    This week I heard a truly fascinating story on NPR about why ALL humans, no matter their skepticism, are inclined to sense or experience the supernatural. The story began with a scientist named Jesse Bering who was a confessing atheist but, upon losing his mom, had a supernatural experience. The evening after her passing, he heard the wind chimes chiming outside her room, as if to indicate that his mother had safely “passed to the other side.”

    Upon having this thought, Bering was surprised at himself. Where did this thought come from? As a seasoned skeptic and proud scientist, why did his brain so easily drift into this non-scientific belief? Bering was fascinated by the psychological implications of his experience, so he decided to study it.

    Bering is not the first to ask this question. As the NPR story explained, “In the history of the world, every culture in every location at every point in time has developed some supernatural belief system,” a reality that has grabbed the attention of the scientific community and warranted much research. More Here...

  • Making Room at the Table

    The lectionary texts for this past Sunday included Luke 14:7-14, the parable of seating at a wedding banquet. During a discussion with some members of my congregation after the service, the following question was raised: "How do we as Christians make room for others at our table?"

    The gist of my response to this question is that making room has nothing to do with the "petty" things like dressing more casually to go to church or having the right style of music or putting on the right programming or making the church "seeker sensitive" -- what the heck does that even mean, anyway? My hunch is that making room at the proverbial table has far more to do with being willing to be wrong and eager to question beliefs that have always been taken for granted.

    The more I immerse myself in theology, the more that I realize that, unlike most academic fields, theology becomes the site of fierce battles precisely because there is so much at stake. If historians made some amazing discovery that proves that George Washington was never a president of the United States, most people would probably be surprised, some people would not care, and a handful of crazies would construct an elaborate theory to prove that the new findings were part of some sort of government conspiracy. In general though, after the initial hubbub around the issue died down, we would correct our history books, the debate would become a distant memory, and we would go on with life as normal. 

    But theology is not like history. More Here...

Wednesday, 01 September 2010

  • Help Collect 800 Million Glasses of Water

    By Matt at The Church of No People

    I’ve got something big to share with you today.

    As of today, I’ve been blogging for twenty-two months.  Last week, I reached the benchmark of 300 blog posts.  That means you’ve now slurped down 300 doses of my amazing wisdom and impeccable wit, and I’ve read through thousands of your comments.

    I always hope that this blog is a meaningful thing to do.  That means writing about meaningful things that I hope will be worth your time.  A couple of months ago, it meant deciding not to put ads on the blog.  It oftentimes means reaching out to some incredible people around the world.

    But today, I’m really pumped, because I’m doing something with the blog that’s very meaningful, and I need your help. 

    I’m collecting about 800 million glasses of water

    …give or take a couple.  I’m not joking. More Here...

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