Power
We who are powerful need to be patient with the weakness of those who don’t have power, and not please ourselves.
Romans 15:1 CEB
Much of what was is lost..
…he opening words of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy: “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was, is lost.”
Differences
There is a vast difference between a friend who disagrees and an enemy who seeks to dominate. One vision sustains democracy. The other could destroy our republic.
David French
Pretending
Thomas Beckingham wrote, “At some point, the two worlds of who we pretend to be and who we really are must collide. It is, however, better to let those two worlds collide rather than have everything snap under the tension of keeping them apart.”
You cannot serve God and Twitter
Alternative views, unpleasant facts, discomforting arguments, contextualizing statistics, are, with ever-greater efficiency, filtered out of what our eyes can see and our minds absorb. And what we therefore believe becomes more fixed, axiomatic, self-reinforcing, and self-affirming. We become siloed into two affective tribes, with dehumanization of each other deepening with every news cycle.
Andrew Sullivan via Richard Beck
a path to the knowledge of God
…a path for the knowledge of God: pay attention to your questions. The result of this path is that you become far more aware of what you don’t know than of the things you think you know. Mere information fades.
Fr. Stephen Freeman
healthy life
To live a free, healthy life we need to discipline our appetites, to regularly deny our cravings, and to rest our tastebuds between magical moments of splendor and deliciousness in order that such moments can be experienced as grace.
Michael Frost
Ageism
Ageism reduces human beings’ capacity for caring too. Globally, people don’t value elderly lives as much as they do young people’s, research shows. When it comes to deciding who lives or dies, there’s a disregard for the elderly, even among the elderly.
The elderly themselves don’t care much about protecting the elderly because they typically don’t think of themselves as such, says Susan Fiske, a Princeton psychologist who has studied ageism and other prejudices. The “old” are always just a little bit older than ourselves.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/covid-death-toll-us-empathy-elderly/616379/
“elder”
There is a reason why the word “elder” carries such weight in Orthodoxy: theology and wisdom are not the province of the young. I have met very brilliant young minds in theological settings, but they are generally minds that do not know what to do with what they know. One way of thinking about this has to do with questions. The same older priest who told me only to speak about what I knew, also told me not to answer questions people weren’t asking. And that advice continues to guide me.
Fr. Stephen Freeman
Prosperity Gospel
The real prosperity gospel isn’t the overt appeal to wealth. It is the more subtle appeal to God guaranteeing that we are going to be happy, and the accompanying pressure to be happy in ways that are acceptable and recognizable to the community of Christians we belong to. (Michael Spencer, from Sept, 2008)
Ethos of morality
The ethos of the morality of the modern world can be reduced to two basic ideas. First, maximize freedom. Second, do no harm. Basically, as long as you don’t hurt anyone you can do as you please. But in such a world we have no idea about how to live well. No clue about what flourishing should look like. So most of us just default to some form of benign or enlightened hedonism. We spend our lives watching Netflix. Trapped in either mindless or addictive routines.
Richard Beck
The glory of God
The glory of God is the love of God, which we see in its fullest expression on divine display at the cross of Jesus—unfathomably full of grace and truth. While his entire life is the cross, Jesus’ finest hour comes on Good Friday. In the hour of his greatest glory, he wears human sovereignty as a crown of thorns. On the darkest day of human history, the Light of the World shines brightest. On the day when the Son of God is emptied of his life, grace and truth are poured out in their fullest measure. In the hour when all of the vitriolic hatred of the human race is unleashed on this sinless suffering servant, the love of God reveals itself as the very essence of divine sovereignty.
J D Walt
Still on the Journey, Have a great week!