Jesus Creed
On the first day when Sweden changed from driving on the left side (English style) to right side (everyone else).
Why can’t people spell it correctly? The word gospel: when it is one of the first four books of the New Testament, it is upper case: Gospel; when it is the message about Jesus, it is lower case: gospel. I see this mistake all the time. I have to wonder if editors and publishers even care.
Andy Holt thinks the World Vision incident revealed that we really do need a big tent evangelicalism:
Jesus had a big tent. The Samaritan woman had almost everything wrong about theology and the Scriptures, but there was room for her. Nicodemus had all the right answers, but was too afraid to openly follow Jesus until after the crucifixion. There was room for him. Martha was a Type A who knew what her place in life was, and there was room for her. Mary dared to sit at Jesus’ feet like one of the disciples – like one of the men – and there was room for her. James and John were audacious enough to ask to sit at Jesus’ right and left when he came in glory, and there was room for them. The lot didn’t fall to Barsabbas to replace Judas, but there was still room for him. There was room for Paul and Peter and Apollos and Junia and Priscilla and Timothy and Titus. There was room for the Roman centurion and for the confessing thief.
Jesus knew that throwing all of those people together, not to mention putting us into the mix as well, would create a volatile situation. They were all broken. They were all sinners. And the whole thing almost blew up because they had a hard time figuring out how to let Gentiles in. But by the grace of God it didn’t, and they all moved forward together.
Gotta love Tony Dungy:
As an All-American linebacker in college and a pro with the National Football League, Keith O’Neil was a champ at bringing down the other team’s players. He won a Super Bowl ring in his second season with the Indianapolis Colts, playing under celebrated coach Tony Dungy.
Blocking and tackling enormous athletes came naturally to him—but an opponent he couldn’t bring down lived inside his own mind. In fact, symptoms of his undiagnosed bipolar disorder kept him out of his first game with the team in September 2005.
“I was very excited to play for Coach Dungy and be part of such a great organization,” he says. “But the stress and change proved to be a very negative trigger for my mental health.”
For the most part, O’Neil tried to mask his debilitating fears and other issues. But as the Colts prepared for their season opener against the Baltimore Ravens, O’Neil realized he was in no shape to play.“I’d gone four nights without sleep and I was frantic and desperate,” O’Neil recalls. “I finally went to Coach Dungy and said, ‘I need help.’”
The depth of caring, empathy, and emotional generosity with which the coach responded still amazes O’Neil. Over the years, the older man has become a source of hope, a mentor, and a role model.
“The only reason I’m able to talk about what I went through is because of Coach Dungy,” O’Neil says now.
At the time, O’Neil says, Dungy listened with his full attention, then pulled in the team doctor, trainer and general manager. The doctor prescribed medications to combat his anxiety and help him sleep.
O’Neil was able to join the Colts for their next game. Several weeks later, he was selected as a team captain.Dungy’s intervention was just one instance of the helping hands that kept O’Neil moving forward and, ultimately, put him on the path to wellness.
Priscilla Pope-Levison’s interview on women evangelists:
CP: I know the bulk of your work is related to women, but what motivated you to pursue this particular area of women evangelists?
Pope-Levison: Well it began about 20 some years ago when I was teaching evangelism at Duke Divinity School and I was putting together an introductory lecture on the history of evangelism in the United States. What I could find were stacks of resources on particularly male evangelists, the great male evangelists beginning with Jonathan Edwards going through Charles Finney to Dwight Moody, all the way to Billy Graham.
Being a woman minister myself and interested in women’s religious leadership, I asked myself the question, ‘Were there any women evangelists beyond Kathryn Kuhlman and Aimee Semple Mcpherson?’ So that really started my research into an amazing amount of material and I feel like in some ways I’ve only scratched the surface after 20 years of research on an enormous amount of women who call themselves evangelists and traveled around the country. This book argues the thesis that they settled down and built institutions during the Progressive Era in our country, which was 1890 to 1920.
Yesterday, I watched Peter Rollins describe his understanding of the Christian faith. Sadly, he loves to scrape and scrape so what was left hardly looked like Christianity. Frankly, his presentation bordered on incoherence.
Irony and mystery so dominated Rollins’ talk that you were left wondering what he really believes. In fact, Rollins admitted not being interested so much in what people believe, but why they believe it. Clearly, he falls prey to a tragic dichotomy as both the what and why of belief are important. This young scraper offered a few good and necessary push backs on the hubris of some Christians. Unfortunately, in the process of exposing some of these silly notions he seemed more than willing to discard some of the core doctrines of the Christian faith.
“Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, one of America’s leading advocates, has just received one of America’s oldest and most prestigious awards—from the Roman Catholic Church….
Many consider Miller a paradoxical figure who occupies the thinly populated no-man’s land between science and religion, embracing both with enthusiasm and finding no conflict. He is a life-long practicing Catholic and accepts church teachings on salvation, the virgin birth and resurrection of Jesus. He described himself in the PBS “Evolution” series as simply a “traditional” Catholic, one who has not had to abandon or distort his beliefs to accommodate his other passion: evolutionary biology. Notre Dame president Fr. John Jenkins describes Miller as an “incisive witness both to scientific acumen and religious belief.”
Consistent with most Catholic believers, and supported by official statements over the years from the Vatican, Miller embraces mainstream science with enthusiasm, accepting that the world is God’s creation. “I see the Creator’s plan and purpose fulfilled in our universe,” he wrote in a personal reflection about evolution. Miller sees the earth “bursting with evolutionary possibilities,” and understands God to be continuously creating with providentially ordered “design to life.” But—and here the salvos begin to be launched from conservative anti-evolutionists—he says “the name of the design is evolution.” Ken Ham’s Answers in Genesis says Miller “appears to be blind” in his support for evolution, and unable to “distinguish between science and religious indoctrination.” The Discovery Institute has literally dozens of articles attacking Miller accusing him of everything from shoddy scholarship to duplicity.”
Chad Holtz on holiness and the progressives.
USA, Cuba and plotting to get rid of Castro:
U.S. scheming against Castro began almost immediately. In 1960, CIA agents contacted high-ranking mafia officials and discussed ways to assassinate Castro, perhaps by poisoning his food and drink. The assassin they chose and supplied, Juan Orta, reportedly got cold feet and abandoned the attempt. The agency’s next attempt to overthrow the Cuban regime was relatively conventional by CIA government-overthrow standards. Using Guatemala (whose own government had been toppled in a U.S.-sponsored coup in 1954) as a base of operations, U.S. spies organized, funded, armed, and trained a ragtag group of about 1,500 Cuban exiles, who planned to storm the Caribbean island and eventually topple the government. In April 1961, these exiles landed in Cuba’s Bay of Pigs and were defeated within three days by Cuban military forces, embarrassing the Kennedy administration and the CIA.
After the Bay of Pigs debacle, the CIA’s anti-Castro plots veered away from thetypical Cold War templates of coups and uprisings and into the realm of absurdity. One scheme involved somehow getting Castro to wear a poison-coated scuba-diving suit. Another, which also played upon Castro’s well-known love for diving, involved obtaining a beautiful seashell that would catch the Cuban dictator’s eye, only to explode when he reached for it. Perhaps the most famous proposal involved poisoning Castro’s iconic cigars.
What testing did to this teacher’s students.
Elizabeth Stoker, private charity vs. public welfare and the Christian faith:
The role of private charity versus that of state-sponsored social programs remains a hotly contested issue in right versus left politics, with the right wing typically favoring a heavy or total reliance upon private charity, and the left typically calling for a more robust emphasis on state-provided programs. What is often presumed, however, in this political discourse is that Christianity, like conservatism, requires a total reliance on private charity to deliver services to the needy. This could not be more wrong.
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