About 4pm on days I’m home I make our salad for dinner, and I like making salads … lots of folks, I suspect, are bored with making salads so they buy bags of pre-made salads and toss a handful or two of stuff into the bowl. I’ve got a few suggestions to make your salads better. First, whether you use lettuce or spinach (we use spinach leaves), cut them up into narrow slices — makes the salad much easier to... Read more
We’re experimenting with something for a couple of weeks: spreading our posts throughout the day instead of loading them up all at once. It was a little cleaner before but it tended to attract all the conversation to one post … so we’ll be doing our Bible study closer to the middle of the day for awhile. So check us early and then come back later. The gospel of Christ is the gospel of peace, the gospel of making two... Read more
Adam Hamilton’s Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: Thoughts on Religion, Morality, and Politics is a perfect blog book. I would love to see a host of evangelical churches using this book for group studies and discussions. It will surely bring out how it is that many think about various topics; it will also reveal what folks think. What Hamilton makes clear to me is that the Third Way is not the way of compromise; instead, it... Read more
Found this here and thought we could have a conversation. In brief, should we expect big business to do good and to make money? Does this make a difference when you choose your vocation or your job or your employer? Is this question being asked more and more? Bill Gates began this discussion a year ago by arguing for a new type of capitalism where firms would do good while doing well, solving the problems of poverty and disease that... Read more
Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, a leading voice of Catholic conservatism in America, and one of those rare theologians and spiritual leaders whose influence vastly exceeded the boundaries of their religious community, has died at 72. Neuhaus slipped away Jan. 8, shortly before 10 o’clock Eastern time. He never recovered from the weakness that sent him to the hospital the day after Christmas, caused by a series of side effects from the cancer he was suffering. A priest of the New... Read more
Sitting a some prime real estate, a church was chosen by the Boston diocese to be sold … but the locals said, “No!,” and they have now guarded the place for more than 1500 days. From NYT. SCITUATE, Mass. — There are sleeping bags in the sacristy at St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church and reclining chairs in the vestibule, but no one here gets too relaxed. “Please be ever vigilant!” a sign by the door warns, and the parishioners who... Read more
A letter from a reader of this blog: I suppose my first question has to do with systematic theology. Until recently, I would consider myself broadly reformed. At the moment, I just don’t know. Recently I’ve grown so tired of trying to figure things out. It seems that I fall off the horse either one way or another. Whichever book I’ve read last seems to be the major influence in my life. It seems that everyone has a good argument... Read more
What happens to women in ministry when the ground on which they are standing suddenly shifts? That is, what happens to women who are “ordained” when the word “ordain” suddenly changes? That is the impact of the first chp in Gary Macy’s The Hidden History of Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West. Ordination is an ecclesial act so it shouldn’t be too hard to determine if women were ordained in the ancient church. So, Macy dips into the... Read more
Paul adds a “wrinkle” to the word “gospel” in Ephesians and it strikes me as very close to how Jesus used his favorite expression, “the gospel of the kingdom.” It is found first in Ephesians 2:17 and is also seen in 3:6, 8 and 6:15. The wrinkle is the concept of peace: the gospel is the gospel of peace. Of course, there is a tendency for some to think “gospel of inner peace with God” but that is not what... Read more
Mark Twain, looking over the shoulders of Burris and Reid, says cynically (and I quote him), “We have the best congress money can buy.” What do you think Burris is saying to Reid? Read more
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