what is the gift of gospel-funk? did the twelve hear horns in the ear like a 120 instrument chorus did you think this was an orchestra? is the ghost-groan a gift of incorporation fixing rices on the scheme of sanctification like salvation in a k-mart package? the spirit comes without instructions for assembly this is…
Category
Theology
Death as A Mode Of Living
…just like Alcoholics Anonymous is the place where you go when you’ve got dependence on alcohol, the community of believers should be the place you go because you’ve got a dependency on religion. …and this for me is the good news of Christianity. It’s not that we repress our anxieties and we “believe” in God…
Bearing False Witness
The first elementary thing about being Christian is of course to refuse to bear false witness. And for me that means recognizing that I am accountable for what I do not know, and that I put myself in a morally perilous position when I do not know about the core convictions of my neighbors. The…
NATURE AS MIRROR by Richard Rohr
In “The Canticle of the Sun,” Francis consistently uses the Italian preposition per, by which he is saying that God is praised through (not for) the very existence of the sun, moon, stars, wind, air, weather, water, fire and earth. This is significant and telling. Their very existence gives glory whether any human ever sees…
The Pax Romana
As Klaus Wengst writes: “That Pilate had Jesus executed on the cross shows that the death of Jesus is indissolubly bound up with the political peace that there was at that time, the Pax Romana, produced and guaranteed by Roman power. In the view of the procurator this execution, like many others, was virtually an…
Sex is tragic and comical.
Nothing will stop sex being tragic and comic. It is above all the area of our lives where we can be rejected in our body entirety, where we can venture into the “exposed spontaneity” that Nagel talks about and find ourselves looking foolish or even repellent, so that the perception of ourselves we are offered…
The Risk of Love
It is not Jesus’ death that transforms but his life–a love life that had the power to persist beyond death, as the stories of the resurrection mysteriously suggest. Granted, that mystery has been almost ruined by dogmatic “I believes.” But for those with ears to hear afresh–the purpose of a Christian life is not whatever…
If your faith and doctrine are like a beautiful house, DO NOT READ THIS!
If your faith and doctrine are like a beautiful house, with the clean lines of certainty and the firm foundation of God’s Truth, then letting me into your house would be, I’d expect, quite unsettling. Because I’d always be looking at a wall and saying “Is this a load bearing wall? Let me knock it…
Communion in the agony of Christ
“The Christian hope that is “not seen” is a communion in the agony of Christ. It is the identification of our own agonia with the agonia of the God Who emptied himself and became obedient unto death. It is the acceptance of life in the midst of death, not because we have courage, or light,…
Emergence Christianity and Dualistic Thinking
We thought that we overcame racism in the 60’s; we thought the church overcame triumphalism at Vatican II, and now forty years later we are right back into this regressive and dualistic thinking all over again. This is the nature of the ego if we have not formed a contemplative mind, a big mind, that…