I preached this sermon on Sunday, July 11, 2010 at the Olivet New Church in Toronto. BITTER WATERS MADE SWEET A Sermon by Rev. Coleman S. Glenn “And they came to Marah, and they could not drink the waters for bitterness, because they were bitter; therefore he called the name of it Marah.” (Exodus 15:23) This morning we read a story about the Children of Israel’s journeys in the wilderness. It’s easy to read the story without really grasping what... Read more
Sorry for the lack of recent posts: I’ve been away at Maple (camp for New Church teens). Over the weekend New Church Perspective posted an article I wrote on whether the Lord has a sense of humour. Read it here. I’d love to hear your thoughts! Read more
This is a sermon I gave June 27, 2009, at the Olivet New Church in Toronto. The Plank and the Splinter A Sermon by Rev. Coleman S. Glenn (more…) Read more
Is my red your red, or do you see red as what I call “blue”? It’s a question that most of us have probably found ourselves wondering about, because we have no way of actually sharing with another person how we perceive a color. But in a post on his blog at Psychology Today, Mark Changizi suggests that humans probably DO see colors in mostly the same way as each other. An excerpt: In essence, I have argued elsewhere that our... Read more
The website inCharacter.org has an interview with Dr. Stephen G. Post, author of Why Good Things Happen to Good People: How to Live a Longer, Healthier, Happier Life by the Simple Act of Giving, and president of the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love. (Call me a cynic, but the name “Institute for Research on Unlimited Love” does not instil in me a lot of confidence; it sounds like a hippie farm or a horrific Orwellian government office.) An excerpt:... Read more
This was a family talk (i.e. kids and adults together) that I delivered at the Olivet New Church in Toronto on Sunday, June 6. The actual talk was only in outline form, so this is just a rough write-up of what I remember saying. David Spares Saul A Sermon by Rev. Coleman S. Glenn This morning we’ll be hearing a story about David and King Saul. At this time, Saul was the king over all the land of Israel. You... Read more
An interesting article from the Boston Globe today about a new book by behavioural economist Dan Ariely called The Upside of Irrationality. Excerpt from the article: On another work-related theme, Ariely shows that people overvalue things they help make themselves. In one experiment, Ariely asks subjects to make an origami animal and then say how much they would pay for it, comparing this price against what nonmakers offered. Makers offered five times the price that nonmakers did. Ariely finds the... Read more
I’m preparing for a sermon on Sunday on the story of David sparing Saul’s life even though Saul had been trying to kill him (1 Samuel 24). In the course of my research, I came across a passage from Arcana Coelestia on “the law of retaliation”: The hells, or the evil who are there, are in the continual cupidity of doing evil to others, for this is the very delight of their life; and therefore as soon as it is... Read more
So much has been written about the LOST finale that it seems almost pointless to add my voice to the din, but it has been my favourite show (i.e. the only show I’ve regularly watched) for the last three years, and I have a lot of thoughts about it. Plus, it had all sorts of fun religious / spiritual elements, and there AREN’T many people in the blogosphere offering a Swedenborgian take on it. More (including spoilers) below. (more…) Read more
It’s been a rough weekend. On Friday, my friend Daniel Van Note killed himself. It has me thinking a lot of thoughts about life and death that I want to share, and eventually I will, but this post is about Dan. I didn’t know Dan as well as his close friends or family, but I knew him well enough to like him a lot. We were at Bryn Athyn College together, and he was still there when I was in... Read more
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