with a post which is perhaps not fully baked, but which I hope will be provocative: The way we pray not only reflects but also shapes what we believe about what it means to follow Jesus. Lex orandi, lex credendi is the old slogan: The law of prayer is the law of belief. Therefore if a movement within the Church hopes to contribute to Christian community and theology, at some point this movement will find ways to embed itself in... Read more
I love this book, y’all. Go pre-order it! Here’s her description of Arriving at Amen: Being a convert and learning to pray is a little bit like studying a foreign language. The trouble is that it’s a lot like studying a foreign language in the new language. It’s hard to even pose a question, when you’re relying on what feels like a pidgin-level of prayer fluency. So, I wound up cobbling together a creole as best I could, building up my understanding of spiritual... Read more
I’m sure you’re shocked: The U.S. government agreed to a police request to restrict more than 37 square miles of airspace surrounding Ferguson, Missouri, for 12 days in August for safety, but audio recordings show that local authorities privately acknowledged the purpose was to keep away news helicopters during violent street protests. more Read more
(…I’m so sorry.) This round-up is going to be hampered by the facts that a) I didn’t sleep well so my attention span wasn’t being all it could LOOK A SQUIRREL, and also b) I left my notes at Wesley Hill’s house by mistake. Bear with me. If you want some live-tweeting, Seminary Guy was workin’ hard, though his tweets are of course in reverse-chron order. I opened Day 2. I basically wanted to do three things: 1) by listing... Read more
opens up a really important area of the conversation: A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I was planning to write a post on celibacy and socioeconomic status. I’ve spent considerable time trying to pull my thoughts together on this topic and have decided that I’d like to explore it in bits and pieces over time. Not much has been written on celibacy and class issues, especially from within the gay Christian blogosphere, so while I see this topic as... Read more
I’m procrastinating from finishing my own presentation by writing up my super-scattered notes from the first three presentations. This is solely the stuff which struck me personally as interesting and isn’t intended as a complete picture of the event so far! Ron Belgau (my paraphrase): The Bible doesn’t appeal to the Creation narratives to settle questions of scientific curiosity. Genesis 1 is about the liturgical rhythms of work and worship. Genesis 2 is about love, loneliness, and marriage. And the... Read more
Hal wills himself to stay objective and not form any judgments before he has serious data, hoping desperately for some sort of hopeful feeling to emerge. Read more
about the decline of trick-or-treating: #1. Traditional Trick-or-Treating Is Dying The first year I lived in California, we had a huge Halloween turnout at our house. So many costumed children showed up that we actually ran out of candy, and I had to run out to the store still dressed as Princess Buttercup and fight a sailor for the last bag of Laffy Taffy. The next year, thinking we’d be prepared, we stocked up on candy early and … maybe... Read more
One of the biggest gaps in the book is its relative silence about prayer. There’s a lot about horizontal relationships with other people–even when prayer is mentioned it’s often prayer to saints, which is still a horizontal relationship although maybe a tilted one–but not much about the vertical relationship of the human soul to God. This is why e.g. I was so struck by St Gregory of Nyssa’s discussion of virginity: For him the vertical relationship is overwhelming, and horizontal... Read more
for those who don’t immediately claw out their eyeballs upon reading the word “Synod”: Is there a place for gay people in the Catholic Church? This month, 253 Catholic leaders, including heads of national bishops’ conferences, heads of the Eastern Catholic churches and lay married couples, met at the Vatican to discuss how the church can better support and guide families. This first meeting of the “Extraordinary Synod on the Family” discussed tough issues like cohabitation and divorce. It also... Read more
Eve Tushnet
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