I attended a charming Christmas pageant a few weeks before Christmas. The small church in a small town is probably close to 100 years old. Can you imagine all the pancake supper fundraisers that paid for this? They were lovely folks with a tired and trite theology that’s hurt people since the day it was invented. I’m a plodding, simple-minded man, far short of a theologian, but the Bible just doesn’t mean what fundamentalists claim it means. Like other Christians... Read more
Some Conservative Christians hated President Obama so much, that after eight years they’ve completely divorced themselves of every message in the Bible. The idea of following the actual words of Jesus has long been on the fringe of the faith. On Inauguration Day, people who are Christian in nothing more than name only were prominent participants in the pageantry of a philandering, pandering, pathological liar. With roots in the segregationist era that opposed civil rights, the Conservative Christians have found... Read more
Scripture tells us that when the Israelites lost faith in the Lord, they demanded a king (1 Samuel 8) and as a result a lot of bad stuff happened to them (most of the rest of the Jewish scripture). Despite clear examples from the Bible, many of the Christian Right put their faith in leaders when they want the United States to be a “Christian nation.” They trust leaders and government, not God. They want to change Supreme Court justices,... Read more
The president-elect of the United States kicked-off the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend by attacking on Twitter a civil rights legend who marched with King. John Lewis, a 14-term member of Congress, announced last week that he intended to protest the inaugural by not attending. Rather than ignore the issue as most mentally-stable people would do, demonstrating once again he has the temperament of a 12-year-old, the president-elect responded to Lewis by tweeting. Lewis has dedicated his life to... Read more
This is really good. I tried to explain previously that Protestants didn’t always oppose abortion and didn’t do nearly as good a job as he does in explaining it. The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal Read more
On the anniversary of the birth of Alexander Hamilton it’s ironic that there were new revelations of president-elect Donald Trump’s moral failings. The Broadway play thrust Hamilton back into the cultural spotlight, but in 1797 the former Secretary of the Treasury was the topic of conversation when he published a 95 page pamphlet admitting to an affair with a married woman. The woman and her husband blackmailed Hamilton and Hamilton admitted to the indiscretion publicly when he was falsely accused... Read more
As a year ends and another begins, I pause to reflect upon the year gone by and consider the year to come. The Roman god Janus was the god of gates, halls, doors, and doorways. The god of beginnings and endings. Janus frequently symbolized change and transitions, such as the progression of past to future, of one condition to another. He represented time, because he looked into the past with one face and into the future with the other. This... Read more
The story begins with the Christmas celebration of the birth of a baby. The Christmas celebration ends with an empty Easter tomb. Let us not rush to get there, but let us not forget how this story ends. We celebrate the birth, but the sting of death is coming. Like all of us, the newborn baby will die. Perhaps you’ve heard that Jesus died for our sins. Perhaps. But here’s another way to look at Jesus. He was born to... Read more
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