June 2012
44 posts
James K.A. Smith: Tradition for innovation →
Thanks to invisibleforeigner for linking to this wonderful post by James K.A. Smith.
From the excellent Faith & Leadership blog.
If our cultural work is going to be restorative —if it is going to put the world to rights— then we need imaginations that have been shaped by a vision for how things ought to be. Our innovation and invention and creativity will need to be bathed in an...
“ … in celebrating his kingdom and feasting at his table, we shall discover...”
– N.T. Wright Jesus and the Victory of God
The Real Problem
Just finished reading N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God for the second time. This paragraph has captured my thoughts once again:
“The real problem, therefore, for historians and theologians alike, is not that Jesus expected the end of the world and it failed to happen; nor that the first generation of Christians expected the return of Jesus (‘the parousia’)...
How to Burn a New Candle
Read this earlier today. Considering my terrible obsession with burning candles, I’m really surprised and embarrassed I never picked up on this little trick:
“I shall now divulge a helpful little detail when burning a candle for the first time: You have to let it burn all the way to the edge of the candle before blowing it out, the first time you burn it. If not, the candle will only...
What's in a name? - Reformation21 Blog →
Some helpful thoughts from Carl Trueman on the many different ways the term “reformed” can be used.
If You Really Listen
A few words from Frederick Buechner’s sermon on Genesis 32:22-31 “The Magnificent Defeat” (in Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons):
“When a minister reads out of the Bible, I am sure that at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most...
Reclaiming a Confidence in Narrative
I spent a few minutes during my lunch break reading through an essay titled “Protestant Hymns, Narrative Theology, and Heresy” by Susan Wise Bauer in a book called Wonderful Words of Life: Hymns in American Protestant History and Theology edited by Richard Mouw and Mark Noll (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004). The whole chapter is pretty fascinating but Bauer makes some concluding comments about...
An Interesting Planet
I’d not read this article “The First Church of Marilynne Robinson” in the New Yorker until I saw Hannah over at invisibleforeigner refer to it yesterday. O’Connell reminded me of one of my favorite paragraphs from Robinson’s Gilead:
“The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain...
Why Women Still Can't Have It All
Rebekah Lyons posted a link to an interesting & provocative article from the Atlantic written by Anne-Marie Slaughter on “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” An excerpt:
“Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to...
Courage to speak and to hear
A couple of lines from a dialogue in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing:
“Your language, Miss Scudder, has certainly the merit of explicitness.”
“I intend it shall have, Sir,” said Mary, tranquilly; “half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly and in a spirit of love.”
William Faulkner, The Art of Fiction No. 12 →
I followed a link in one of John Wilson’s tweets yesterday and loved reading this conversation between Jean Stein and William Faulkner in early 1956 on the Paris Review.
Here are the first couple of lines:
Interviewer:
”Mr. Faulkner, you were saying a while ago that you don’t like interviews.”
William Faulkner:
”The reason I don’t like interviews...
“If Western history has proved one thing, it is that the narratives of the Bible...”
– Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books (via invisibleforeigner)
A Believing Criticism
Dr. David Lincicum, Lecturer in New Testament Studies at Oxford University, wrote a moving post today that deserves a glance. But I admittedly share a biased connection to almost anyone who worked in the Biblical Exegesis program at Wheaton. A couple of thoughts that caught my eye:
“Many of us believe that one can be both critical and evangelical in one’s interpretation of the Bible...
Empathy
Enjoyed these words from this post on Seth Godin’s blog from several weeks ago (May 24, 2012).
When a politician or a pundit vilifies someone for her actions, he’s missed the point, because all he can do is imagine what he would do in that situation, completely avoiding an opportunity to see the world through someone else’s eyes, to try on a new worldview, to attempt to...
“Those of us who accept a historical tradition find ourselves burdened by its...”
– Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books
I think I’m just going to quote this whenever someone tells me they’re ‘spiritual but not religious’ or ‘I believe in Jesus but I don’t want to be called a Christian.’
Ancient Church in Rome, Restored and Imagined →
One of the earliest churches in the Roman Forum has been partially restored.
The Church Has to Live
Two short paragraphs written by J. Louis Martyn that I think about almost every day:
“… the Church has to live, as it has always lived, having on its hands so to speak, both the magnificent triumphalism of Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus and a world staggering under the loads of poverty, genocide, war, and myriad other forms of dehumanization. That brings us to the necessary...
The Barth Volumes
Wesley Hill, a guy who I actually do not know at all but follow on Twitter, tweeted a quote this morning from Charles Cousar:
“Hope… is the thin line between impatience that cannot wait and despair that can only wait.”
I like the quotation a lot but mostly I appreciate the man. Dr. Cousar is New Testament Professor Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary. When I was a New...
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecented in the history of the...”
– James Baldwin
Innovation & Christian Thinking
Alan Jacobs wrote an interesting post today on the technological practices of Christians and our tendency to imitate instead of innovate. He says:
“I’m sure there must be innovative stuff out there, truly and deeply grounded in distinctive Christian practices, but it’s hard for me to find. In many ways no point could be more familiar: Church buildings look just like ordinary civic...
“… don’t let me ever hear you say, “I can’t read fiction....”
– John Waters
What is going on here?
I’m in a Parables class right now. I know. I’m obsessed with school. Even when I try to quit, I just end up right back in another degree program. But, what else is new? Anyway, one of THE primary objectives of this class is to explore the historical context of Jesus’ parables. And we’re reading N.T. Wright, who as I’ve already mentioned, interprets a good number of...
“You owe it to all of us to get on with what you’re good at.”
– W.H. Auden quoted here by Karen Swallow Prior.
The Parable Creates a New World
In Jesus and the Victory of God, N.T. Wright interprets the parable of the prodigal son as Israel’s story of exile and restoration. This interpretation is crucial for his entire theological program. As Wright puts it “Jesus himself believed that he was the agent of this strange return from exile” (128). The hope for restoration was being fulfilled in the person of Jesus “but it does not look...
Forward Directions
A segment from N.T. Wright’s Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996):
“We must take the historical questions & challenges on board; we cannot retreat into a private world of ‘faith’ which history cannot touch (what sort of a god would we be ‘believing’ in if we did?). The forward direction may not be comfortable, either for scholarship...
Beloved
Raymond Carver as quoted in Traveling Mercies by Anne Lamott:
“And did you get what
you wanted from this life even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.”
Home Is Where One Starts From
A portion from the second of Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot
(“East Coker” second half of V):
“Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones...
In Pursuit of Silence
An interesting chunk of text from In Pursuit of Silence by George Prochnik:
“The special character of the new noisiness was driven home to me one summer weekend when I rode around Washington, D.C. with an officer from the Metropolitan Police to find out how the force responds to noise complaints. John Spencer was a large, unassuming, talkative man who’d grown up in high-crime...
Lead
“Lead” a poem by Mary Oliver in New and Selected Poems: Volume Two (Beacon Press)
“Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
...
The Outlook is Not So Good
I’m working at the Library today and during my lunch break was browsing the two rows filled with the works of (and about) Walker Percy. I picked up Love in the Ruins and started thumbing through its pages. I was delighted to see some cursive notes in the margin dating back to 1978, the year before my older sister was born. Lots of folks hate when others write in library books, but from time...
I Ain't So Sure.
One of my favorite books is East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck creates fantastic dialogue and his characters are so unique and memorable. I decided to pick up The Grapes of Wrath a few weeks ago since I’m pretty sure I opted for the Cliff’s Notes version in high school English. The preacher Jim Casy, who has left his ministry for a season of isolation and soul-searching, if you...
The Great Bright Dream
An excerpt from Gilead by Marilynne Robinson:
“It was a very clear night, or morning, very still, and then there was such energy in the things transpiring among those trees, like a storm, like travail. I stood there a little out of range, and I thought, It is all still new to me. I have lived my whole life on the prairie and a line of oak trees can still astonish me. I feel sometimes as if...
The Searchers
This past weekend I read The Searchers: A Quest for Faith in the Valley of Doubt by Joseph Loconte and really enjoyed it. One sentence in particular stands out to me today:
“The experience of going home—if it is a good and happy home—not only can be a comfort to us, it also can become a distraction, something that keeps us from fulfilling a great task or obligation set...
The Bible Doesn't "Say"
Dr. Reeves writes at http://agenuinefaith.blogspot.com/ and he never fails to provoke thought. I love this snippet from his blog post Driving the Wrong Direction on a One Way Street on May 15.
Here’s my problem: the Bible doesn’t say anything. It must be read. And, we all are readers. Yet, some read more than others. In fact, I’ve come to the recent conclusion that most...
