Andrè Louf is a Trappist monk and a master of prayer. His little book is titled Teach Us to Pray. Louf makes a provocative observation about the Word of God and prayer, particularly, about the Psalms. (Please overlook the gender choices.) In their naked and literal human aspect the psalms are at once poetry and prayer: prayer indeed, but in poetic form. Their potency, however, is not merely a human thing. God himself is using and producing the word that... Read more
In a previous post I grabbed Douglas Campbell’s detailed, analytical outline of what he calls “Justification Theory,” a view of the gospel that is shaped by a kind of merits and credits (though in divine reckoning), and today I want to grab the theory he thinks Paul adhered to, a more liberation gospel, one that sets us free. It comes from his book The Deliverance of God: An Apocalyptic Rereading of Justification in Paul. At the end of the post I... Read more
Almighty Father, whose dear Son, on the night before he suffered, instituted the Sacrament of his Body and Blood: Mercifully grant that we may receive it thankfully in remembrance of Jesus Christ our Lord, who in these holy mysteries gives us a pledge of eternal life; and who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. Before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart... Read more
From CNN: Gunmen burst into early-morning Christian prayers, said Joel Ayora, who was on the campus and witnessed the attack. Taking hostages from the service, the gunmen then “proceeded to the hostels, shooting anybody they came across except their fellows, the Muslims.” The attackers separated students by religion, allowing Muslims to leave and keeping an unknown number of Christians hostage, Agence France-Presse reported. “We were sleeping when we heard a loud explosion that was followed by gunshots and everyone started... Read more
Source: Given that you’re reading a post about bookstores written by a word nerd fromGrammarly for HuffPost Books, we can safely assume that you’re a reader. So where do you buy books? A few years ago, your answer was probably a big box chain like Borders, Barnes and Noble, or online superstore, Amazon. Local independent bookstores were on the decline, and it seemed only a matter of time before they became a quaint relic of the past – like soda fountains... Read more
The final chapter of Iain Provan’s book Seriously Dangerous Religion: What the Old Testament Really Says and Why It Matters gives an answer to the question suggested by the title. Is Christianity, grounded as it is in the Old Testament Story with new dimensions from the New Testament, actually dangerous? Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) among others have suggested that religious belief in general and Christian belief in particular... Read more
That fussy but relentless atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, as he always does, lays it on the line when it comes to the Christian belief in an eternal heaven of goodness, saying, The “most contemptible of all unrealisable promises” generated by the Christian gospel is the impudent doctrine of personal immortality.” So where did that conviction take him? A new pride my ego taught me, and this I teach men: no longer to bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly... Read more
Flannery O’Connor, in a letter to Cecil Dawkins in 1957: I’m a full-time believer in writing habits, pedestrian as it all may sound. You may be able to do without them if you have genius but most of us only have talent and this is simply something that has to be assisted all the time by physical and mental habits or it dries up and blows away. I see it happen all the time. Of course you have to make... Read more
Brian Bethue, Genna Buck: The child’s evident character traits—compassion, acceptance, fearlessness—at so young an age prompted Miller’s eureka moment. What struck her was the nod and all it implied: “It was clear as day that the grandchild fully understood how one lives out spiritual values in her family.” Twenty minutes later, Miller was in her lab, running equations on the data that were, in effect, a search for “the statistical nod.” She was looking for mother-teen pairs who had reported... Read more
Christians defend certain days of the Holy Weekend. For instance, we’ll defend the idea that on Friday Jesus actually dies on a cross to save the world from its sin. Then we’ll turn around and defend Easter Sunday as the day that Jesus actually rose from the grave… But nobody defends Saturday. Nobody writes apologetics defending the belief that Jesus actually lay dead for one long, endless day two thousand years ago. –A.J. Swoboda This is a big week... Read more
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