Category: Notes Anthology

Digital evil

My 6-year-old boy died in January. We lost him after a household accident, one likely brought on by a rare cerebral-swelling condition. Paramedics got his heart beating, but it was too late to save his brain. I could hold his hand, look at the small birthmark on it, comb his hair, and call out for him, but if he could hear me or feel me, he gave no sign. He had been a child in perpetual motion, but now we couldn’t get him to wiggle a finger.

My grief is profound, ragged, desperate. I cannot imagine how anything could feel worse.

But vaccine opponents on the internet, who somehow assumed that a COVID shot was responsible for my son’s death, thought my family’s pain was funny. “Lol. Yay for the jab. Right? Right?” wrote one person on Twitter. “Your decision to vaccinate your son resulted in his death,” wrote another. “This is all on YOU.” “Murder in the first.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/covid-vaccine-misinformation-social-media-harassment/673537/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=atlantic-daily-newsletter&utm_content=20230328&utm_term=The%20Atlantic%20Daily

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Enchantment

There has been a yearning in me that I’m only just beginning to to understand: a craving for transcendent experience, for depth, for meaning – making.  : It’s not just that the world needs to change-l need to change, too. I need to soften, to let go of my tight empirical boundaries, to find a greater fluidity in my being. I’m seeking what the poet John Keats called negative capability, that intuitive mode of thought that allows us to reside in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason. The subtle magic of the world  offers comfort, but I don’t know how to receive it. 

Enchantment – Katherine May Pg 8

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Church as family

As I’ve studied the theme of church as family in Paul’s epistles I’m unconvinced that the biblical model can work with more than 100 people at a time…and that might be stretching it…maybe we should redefine success in ministry…

Phoenix Preacher

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Powerlessness

Admitting we are powerless over people, places and things, and that our lives have become unmanageable, can be one of the most difficult, yet one of the most freeing, admissions of our lives. It is usually beyond our comprehension that admitting powerlessness and unmanageability will help us find peace. For many, if not most of us, this admission implies we have given up or we are defeated. However, this is exactly what the First Step is asking us to do: admit defeat. But, we are only admitting defeat in relation to our way of doing things. 

…what happens on the other side on our admission of defeat: 

Admitting our powerlessness frees us to allow the One who is Power to become active in our lives. We become more open to new ways of doing things as we allow God to love us and teach us how to give and receive love. We also begin to accept people and situations as they are. As we realize we aren’t in control, but God is in control, we are more able to detach from people and situations that are unhealthy for us, and accept these the way they are. This doesn’t mean we quit caring. We care, but we don’t allow the situation to determine our thoughts, actions and feelings. We will discover, as our detachment and acceptance deepens, that we have more emotional energy to spend on ourselves and the activities we would like to do.  

Catherine Chapman

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Love the sinner hate the sin

…Evangelicals don’t approve of gay sexual relations. This is expected given their views that this activity is sinful. But what about the “love the sinner, hate the sin” dynamic? And let’s remember the finding from above: Evangelicals report being the most accepting of people (compared to other religious groups), even when those people are doing things they disagree with. So, do Evangelicals separate their feelings about gay behavior from their feelings about gay persons? The results from another “feeling thermometer”: Of all the religious groups Evangelicals score the lowest with the most negative feelings toward gays as people.

Richard Beck

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We learn by doing it wrong

Any talk of growth, achievement, climbing, improving, and progress highly appeals to the ego. But the only way we stay on the path with any authenticity is to constantly experience our incapacity to do it, our failure at doing it. That’s what makes us, to use my language, fall upward. Otherwise, we’re really not climbing; we’re just thinking we’re climbing by saying to ourselves, “Look, I’m better today. Look, I’m holier than I was last week. Look, my prayer is improving.” That really doesn’t teach us anything or lead us anywhere new.  

In contrast, it is recognizing, “Richard, you don’t know how to love at all” that keeps me on the path of love. Constant failure at loving is ironically and paradoxically what keeps us learning how to love. When we think we’re there, there’s nothing to learn.  

Richard Rohr

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Seeing- Stopping

The practice of Seeing…is simply a posture of social mindfulness. The practice of Seeing is paying attention to–seeing, really seeing–the person right in front of you. 

 Older translations of the Bible use the word “Behold” a lot. “Beholding” is deeper than mere “looking.” You can look, but not behold. The practice of Seeing is a practice of beholding others. Consider the failure of the Rich Man in the parable with the poor man Lazarus. Lazarus sits at the Rich Man’s gate begging, sores covering his body which the dogs came and licked. Though sitting at his very door, the Rich Man never sees Lazarus, never beholds him. Most of our failures to welcome others begin and end with these failures of beholding. Practices of Seeing try to bring people into view.

The practice Stopping is a variant of of the practice of Seeing. We often don’t see people because of the pace of our lives, our hurry and preoccupations. We have agendas and stuff to get done. Consequently, we tend to blow right past people. The practice of Stopping is a practice of slowing and becoming interruptible.

Richard Beck 

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2023/03/practicing-jesus-part-7-practices-of.html

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Global Christianity

In his book “The Unexpected Christian Century,” Scott Sunquist notes that in 1900, about 80 percent of the world’s Christian population lived in the Western world and about 20 percent in the majority world. By 2000, only 37 percent lived in the Western world, and nearly two-thirds lived in the majority world. Sub-Saharan Africa had the most striking growth of Christianity, growing from around 9 percent Christian at the beginning of the 20th century to almost 45 percent at the end of it. There are around 685 million Christians in Africa now.

“Christianity at the beginning of the 21st century,” said George, “is the most global and most diverse and the most dispersed faith.

Statistics vary but even conservative estimates guess there were around 98 million evangelical Christians globally in 1970. Now, there are over 342 million.

The future of American Christianity is neither white evangelicalism nor white progressivism. The future of American Christianity is probably not one where white concerns and voices dominate the conversation. The future of American Christianity now appears to be a multiethnic community that is largely led by immigrants or the children of immigrants. And that reality ought to change our present conversations about religion in America.

Tish Harrison Warren NYT

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A Prayer for When God Seems Absent 

Oh God, comfortable would we be if You gave us formulas and answered prayers and realized hope. But You call us beyond comfort. 

But God, life upends us. We face divorce or miscarriages, financial struggles or job insecurity, and the people we love are tossed about by disease or loneliness or homelessness or addiction. 

We are afraid. We don’t have adequate answers. And sometimes we can’t find You. 

Or, we can’t find the person we hoped You would be. 

May we learn to trust that You aren’t asleep on the job. That You haven’t forgotten us. That You are as near to us as our very breath. Give us the courage to press on. To suffer with hope that You have overcome the world. 

May again and again we be awed by Your presence. That even when we feel like we’ve hit rock bottom, may we recognize we have fallen into Your arms because there is no place so deep or so dark or so scary that Your presence cannot reach. 

In the name of the One who can still the seas with mere words, amen.

Kate Bowler Jessica Richie

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Worshipping Satan

When I make myself and my pleasure my highest value, my highest vision of the good life, then I am worshipping the devil. 

I’m convinced the worship of the devil is not so obvious; it is evidenced in a heart that has made its outward priorities an inward map of their motivations, motivations clearly pointed back at one’s own care above others. I’m a big fan of self-care. But it’s not the goal; rather, it is a means to wholeness and fruitfulness for the sake of renewing our call to sonship and daughterhood in the world.

Dan Wilt  

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY

Wonder
My faith is held together by wonder—by every defiant commitment to presence and paying attention. I cannot tell you with precision what makes the sun set, but I can tell you how those colors, blurred together, calm my head and change my breath. I will die knowing I lived a faith that changed my breathing. A faith that made me believe I could see air.
Richard Rohr  

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Self awareness

Albert Camus once said, “An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.”

In psychology, “meta-cognition” is a person’s ability to be aware of their own thoughts and emotions and have thoughts/emotions about those thoughts and emotions in real time. 

Meta-cognition is more casually known as “self-awareness” and is tied to all sorts of positive outcomes, from better emotional regulation to more focus and discipline and overall happiness and well-being. 

Self-awareness is at the root of all personal improvement. Until you’re aware of your problems, there is little you can do to improve them.

Mark Manson

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The peril of humanity
What is at stake in the modern world is our humanity. The notion that we are self-authenticating individuals is simply false. We obviously do not bring ourselves in existence – it is a gift. And the larger part of what constitutes our lives is simply a given – a gift. It is not always a gift that someone is happy with – they would like themselves to be other than they are. But the myth of the modern world is that we, in fact, do create ourselves and our lives – our identities are imagined to be of our own making. We are only who we choose to be. It is a myth that is extremely well-suited for undergirding a culture built on consumption. Identity can be had at a price. The wealthy have a far greater range of identities available to them – the poor are largely stuck with being who they really are.

But the only truly authentic human life is the one we receive as a gift from God. The spirituality of choice and consumption under the guise of freedom is an emptiness. The identity we create is an ephemera, a product of imagination and the market. The habits of the marketplace serve to enslave us.

Fr Stephen Freeman

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Seeing
Jesus says the only people who can recognize and be ready for what he’s talking about are the ones who come with the mind and heart of a child. It’s the same reality as the beginner’s mind. The older we get, the more we’ve been betrayed and hurt and disappointed, the more barriers we put up to the beginner’s mind. We move further away from the immediate delight and curiosity of small children. We must never presume that we see, and we must always be ready to see anew. But it’s so hard to go back, to be vulnerable, and to say to our soul that “I don’t know anything.”

Spirituality is about seeing. It’s not about earning or achieving. It’s about relationship rather than results or requirements. Once we see, the rest follows. We don’t need to push the river, because we’re in it. The life is lived within us, and we learn how to say yes to that life.

Richard Rohr

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Poverty

The United States has a poverty problem.
A third of the country’s people live in households making less than $55,000. Many are not officially counted among the poor, but there is plenty of economic hardship above the poverty line. And plenty far below it as well. According to the Supplemental Poverty Measure, which accounts for government aid and living expenses, more than one in 25 people in America 65 or older lived in deep poverty in 2021, meaning that they’d have to, at minimum, double their incomes just to reach the poverty line.

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Customer service

74% of Americans say they’ve had product or service problem in the past year, according to the 10th edition of the National Customer Rage Survey, which tracks satisfaction and incivility. The incidence of problems has more than doubled since 1976. 

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Repugnant cultural other

Susan harding coined the phrase “repugnant cultural other.” It is a neat and ugly description of that process of demonising the other, misrepresenting the argument, refusal to understand the person, and the evacuation of empathy and compassion the better to wound and reject those who think differently, live differently and are different, and therefore a threat to the way we want the world to be.

Culture war is a battle for the supremacy of one viewpoint over others, a refusal of tolerance, often accompanied by a self-righteous claim to truth and right. Tolerance is not weakness if it is holding to our own convictions while doing our best to listen, understand and respect the convictions of others. Intolerance is not always strength; most times it is insecurity with the volume turned up.

I for one can’t combine the mindset of the culture warrior with the mindset of the ambassador of Christ entrusted with a ministry of reconciliation.

Jim Gordon

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Seaweed Apocolypse 

A giant seaweed bloom – so large it can be seen from outer space – may be headed towards Florida’s Gulf Coast. 

The sargassum bloom, at around 5,000 miles wide, is twice the width of the United States and is believed to be the largest in history. 

Drifting between the Atlantic coast of Africa and the Gulf of Mexico, the thick mat of algae can provide a habitat for marine life and absorb carbon dioxide. 

However, the giant bloom can have disastrous consequences as it gets closer to the shore. Coral, for instance, can be deprived of sunlight. As the seaweed decomposes it can release hydrogen sulfide, negatively impact the air and water and causing respiratory problems for people in the surrounding area. 

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Church

“The church as an alternative community in the world is not a ‘volunteer association’, and accident of human preference. The church as a wedge of newness, as a foretaste of what is coming, as a home for the odd ones, is the work of God’s sovereign mercy. For all its distortedness, the church peculiarly hosts God’s power for life.”

Walter Brueggemann

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Aversion to reality

The whole tendency of equity language is to blur the contours of hard, often unpleasant facts. This aversion to reality is its main appeal. Once you acquire the vocabulary, it’s actually arouses no emotion. The second is rudely blunt and bitter, and it might make someone angry or sad. Imprecise language is less likely to offend. Good writing—vivid imagery, strong statements—will hurt, because it’s bound to convey painful truths.

THE MORAL CASE AGAINST EUPHEMISM
Banning words won’t make the world more just.
BY GEORGE PACKER

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STILL ON THE JOURNEY