Readings (24 June 2014)

Our Abraham, Not Theirs, by David P. Goldman, from The Tablet. In a review of Jon Levenson’s Inheriting Abraham (published a year ago, but I just reread it and wanted to commend it), Goldman explains that Levenson argues that

Misunderstanding is not what divides the image of Abraham in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the misnomered “Abrahamic religions”; on the contrary, the founders of the younger religions well understood Abraham’s role in Judaism. St. Paul’s transformation of Abraham into the father of all who believe, and the Quran’s recasting of Abraham as a Muslim prophet who prefigured Muhammed, both rejected the Jewish version by design, by inventing their own Abrahams to serve their own doctrinal purposes.

Through published excerpts and interviews, Levenson has been drawing attention to his most provocative conclusion: that it is wrong to present Abraham as a unifying figure who transcends the differences among Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

What No One Told Me about Catholicism, by Gabriel Torretta, O.P., from the Dominica weblog.

When I hear the term “popular piety,” I often think about the sweet old ladies who would corner me after mass when I was in graduate school, foisting on me fistfuls of holy cards and devotional pamphlets they pulled out of their overstuffed purses, assuring me with utter confidence that God wanted me to become a priest, based on nothing other than their knowledge that I was a single man in my twenties showing up to daily mass (They won this round, I guess).

But “Popular piety . . . is another way of describing the culture that the Holy Spirit brings into being through the particular temperaments, tendencies, presuppositions, desires, and needs of a given community. It involves every aspect of the person in the same way a national culture does, allowing members of the faith culture to express their love for God in big and small ways that are at once completely intimate and widely shared.”

65 years ago, Altoona was Billy Graham’s crucible, from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Before the Los Angeles crusade that made him famous, Graham preached a two week in Altoona, the western Pennsylvania railroad hub.

as he recalled it, local pastors quarreled with him and each other, conversions lagged behind his expectations and services were disrupted. He recalled leaving the coal-burning town “discouraged and with painful cinders in my eyes.”

“If I ever conducted a campaign that was a flop, humanly speaking, Altoona was it!” Rev. Graham wrote in his 1997 memoir, “Just As I Am.”

“We could not help but sense that Satan was on the attack,” he wrote. Rev. Graham, by then 30 years old and a veteran of more than 10 years on the revival trail, he thought of quitting and focusing on his day job as president of a Minnesota Bible college.

Thanks to my friend Mark Barrett, proprietor of the Snug of the Pub tumblr, for the link to the last.