Front Porch View
Closing the front porch has magnified the impact of pandemic restrictions. Opportunities to engage people on and from the front porch provided much needed social interaction. My mental and emotional demeanor has suffered as a result. No sympathy, please. I am experiencing what most people have been dealing with for months. I am thankful for my front porch privilege and look forward to spring.
Peter Kuzmich once said, “Hope is the ability to hear the music of the future. Faith is having the courage to dance to that song today.”
Hunting an invisible dragon ?
In a memorable thought experiment, the astrophysicist and writer Carl Sagan described taking a visitor to see a fire-breathing dragon in his garage. Upon entering, the visitor was surprised to find an empty space – but Sagan replied that he had simply forgotten to mention that the dragon was invisible. The visitor then decides to throw a bag of flour on the floor to trace its outline – only to find out that it will be of no use because the dragon hovers off the ground. When the visitor suggests using an infrared camera, he is told that the dragon’s flames are heatless. There is no way, in other words, to either prove or falsify its existence.
Hypocrisy
Hypocrisy is bad, but it’s not nearly as bad as political combatants make it out to be. Let’s suppose I am a heroin addict who goes around telling people not to use drugs. Yes, I am a hypocrite. But I wouldn’t be a better person if I went around trying to convince everybody to chase the dragon. If I said, “Come on, kids, do it. It’ll make you cool,” I’d be less hypocritical, but a worse person.
Jonah Goldberg
Pulchritudinous
Evil
For evil is not an argument: It is a thing. And the answer to evil is not logic but the cross. …. And I live in the hope that the cross has laid the groundwork for that Day when evil is no more, and love is perfected. Not Logic, but Love
God’s Kingdom
…the whole story of Jesus — his birth, life, teaching, miracles, death and resurrection — tell us all we need to know about God’s kingdom.
It looks like love, justice, peace, joy, and hope.
It looks like the subversion of toxic religious leadership.
It looks like healing, wholeness and reconciliation.
It looks like freedom.
It looks like forgiveness and mercy.
It looks like preferential treatment for children, the poor and the disabled.
It looks like the end of all suffering.
Or as Tom Wright says, “It looks like Jesus weeping at the tomb of his friend. It looks like Jesus feasting with sinners. It looks like Jesus celebrating a last meal with his friends, and going off to the cross. That’s how God runs the world. It is a very different thing from being a ‘celestial CEO.’ In other words, God takes charge of the world by coming in person to the place where the world is in pain, and taking that pain upon himself.”
Michael Frost
Church Growth
China has 40 million Christians, 94 percent are evangelicals, six percent Catholic and the church is growing by leaps and bounds with no political protections, a police state with more technological monitoring than any country on earth, according to Rod Dreher in his new book “Live not by Lies.” Yet despite continued persecution, the Church grows.
Nones are on the rise and they are the fastest growing body of nonbelievers in America, far outpacing evangelicals and Catholics. The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public — and a third of adults under 30 — are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.
Evidence
In a post-rational world, people will believe everything under the sun on the thinnest shreds of personal experience alone, but when it comes to the Bible, they will demand proof worthy of the rules of evidence.
JD Walt
Survival of Church in America
If the church in America cannot survive and thrive within the umbrella of liberty it now possesses, then might I suggest that the fault lies not with our politics, but within the church itself.
David French
Icons
They were (and are) “windows into heaven.” The Fathers said of icons that they “make present that which they represent.” They are a means of communion. In the museum-world of modernity, what is contemplated is our own feelings and thoughts. Beauty becomes “art,” serving only our self-gratification.
Fr. Stephen Freeman
Beauty
…we perceive beauty because it is real and true, and discover in it, a gateway into the mystery of the universe, that which lies beneath and within. Beauty may be compared to the meaning in a text. The letters and words are the surface – our ability to perceive their meaning is something yet more. It is surprising that we tend not to be astonished by this fact.
Fr. Stephen Freeman
Worth repeating: