Just read a great article by Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit Priest, over at Huffington Post about experiencing God in moments of exaltation and clarity. These are the two kinds of experiences that have been strongest in leading me to belief in the the Lord. I particularly like the quote from W.H. Auden: One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We liked each other... Read more
Last year I spent a fair amount of time answering emails sent to the outreach department at newchurch.org, and out of necessity I learned about current Christian beliefs in America – and in the process discovered dispensationalism. Dispensationalism is HUGE in American Christianity (although less so internationally, as far as I know) – and it didn’t exist in Swedenborg’s time. The basic idea of dispensationalism is that there were several unique “dispensations” to the human race. The divisions vary, but... Read more
Flyers win! I don’t get TSN (the channel the hockey game was on), so I headed to a sports bar to watch the third period of Game 6 between the Flyers and the Bruins. At the bar I ran into a guy who started talking to me about religion. It turned out he wanted to get his daughter baptized and wasn’t sure what church he wanted her to be baptized in. He asked what my church taught about homosexuality, and... Read more
First off, sorry for the week long absence from this blog, and sorry that this post won’t be very substantial – I was gone from Friday through Monday on a young adult retreat in Asheville, North Carolina (it was great!), and I’m still trying to catch up on work. Several of the blogs I follow have posted this video, a parody of a lot of contemporary Christian worship services. I’ve only been to a few of these kinds of services,... Read more
There’s a good blog post over at the Beretta Blog pointing out the error in the argument of those who accuse others of falling into the “Lottery Fallacy.” This group calls it a fallacy to argue for the existence of Divine design from the improbability of life-supporting universe, since this universe was no less likely to come into existence than any other universe. Here’s an excerpt: “One type of argument that some philosophers use in favour of the existence of God... Read more
Are all religions the same? Last week religion professor Stephen Prothero published an article in the Boston Globe arguing that “it is misleading — and dangerous — to think that religions are different paths to the same wisdom.” (HT Rod Dreher). An excerpt: To claim that all religions are basically the same, therefore, is not to deny the differences between a Buddhist who believes in no god, a Jew who believes in one God, and a Hindu who believes in... Read more
Last week I posted a quote that I love from True Christian Religion, which says, “God alone acts; man permits himself to be acted upon, and cooperates to all appearance as if of himself, although interiorly from God” (TCR 588). To me, everything comes down to this. When I am able to get some kind of sense of this, the world makes sense to me, I love people, I love the Lord, I see clearly, and I am happy. That’s... Read more
In Monday’s New York Times, Mark Oppenheimer reviews a new book by Lisa Miller entitled Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife. The review mentions a few specific views of heaven that Miller explores, including the Swedenborgian view of heaven: Over time, she explains, visions of heaven became more specific. The Book of Revelation is especially vivid. In the Middle Ages, Christians gave heaven strata, where the righteous were sorted into levels. Dante and Milton embroidered the Christian imagination of the afterlife even further.... Read more
As you can see, I’ve changed my blog “theme” or layout. This is a brand new theme on WordPress, and I like it more than my old one. The problem is that this is the new default theme, and even the header picture (which I like more than any of the other available header images) is the default. All of which means my blog will look like the blog of everyone who starts a WordPress blog and doesn’t bother to... Read more
Has Christianity substantially changed since the Writings were published in the 18th century? Are Swedenborg’s condemnation of Christian doctrine still accurate? It’s a question that I’ve wondered about at least since college, when I wrote my senior paper on the topic. My conclusion in that paper was that by and large, the official doctrines of the Christian churches have remained pretty similar, especially in regard to the Trinity of Persons. To what extent people believe those doctrines is a much... Read more
Good and Truth
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