For the Joy of the Journey

So Much To Think About

George July 7, 2022 Notes Anthology 0 Comments

metanoia
is the word translated as “repentance” in the Bible. The root concept of the word means “to turn,” associated with a “change” or “turn” of heart and mind. For Peterson, metanoia is a sign of humble fallibility–a willingness to admit error, to learn, to grow. That’s a really healthy posture when life hits you with some hard truths, especially truths about your own failings and limitations. Here’s Peterson:
The devil, traditional representation of evil, refuses recognition of imperfection, refuses to admit “I was in error, in my action, in my representation”; accepts as a consequence of unbending pride, eternal misery–refuses metanoia, confession and reconciliation…
Such refusal–the inability to say, “I was wrong, I am sorry, I should change,” means the death of hope, existence in the abyss…
The act of metanoia is adaptation itself: admission of error, founded on faith in ability to tolerate such admission and its consequences…
Richard Beck

A spiritual discipline is
…a repeated practice that nourishes one’s soul and expands one’s sense of the grandeur of God and the connectedness of creation. Dallas Willard
Well done. Willard sometimes spoke of the disciplines as creating openness to God and to grace and to the Spirit.

Dissent
Inherent to all traditional religion is the peril of stagnation. What becomes settled and established may easily turn foul. Insight is replaced by clichés, elasticity by obstinacy, spontaneity by habit. Acts of dissent prove to be acts of renewal.
It is therefore of vital importance for religious people to voice and to appreciate dissent. And dissent implies self-examination, critique, discontent. Creative dissent comes out of love and faith, offering positive alternatives, a vision.
Self-criticism is quite rare in the history of religion, yet it is necessary to keep religion from its natural tendency toward arrogant self-assurance—and eventually idolatry, which is always the major sin for biblical Israel. We must also point out, however, that mere critique usually deteriorates into cynicism, skepticism, academic arrogance, and even post-modernistic nihilism. So be very careful and very prayerful before you own any self-image of professional critic or anointed prophet! Negativity will do you in.
Richard Rohr

Followers of Jesus are the light of the world…a city set on a hill…a lamp so that others may glorify God, unless you’re a really cool band of Christians, and then you can just sing about a vague spirituality of love which cannot be distinguished from any other positive way of thinking.
Matt Redmond

Living in Community
Until and unless Christ is experienced as a living relationship between people, the gospel remains largely an abstraction. Until Christ is passed on personally through faithfulness and forgiveness toward another, through concrete bonds of union, I doubt whether he is passed on by words, sermons, institutions, or ideas.
Living in community means living in such a way that others can access me and influence my life. It means that I can get “out of myself” and serve the lives of others. Community is a world where kinship with each other is possible. By community I don’t mean primarily a special kind of structure, but a network of relationships. Sadly, on the whole, we live in a society that’s built on competition, not on community and cooperation.
Richard Rohr

Modesty Phenomenon
David Brooks dives into the false modesty phenomenon, and why it’s found such a natural home online. “If you’ve spent any time on social media, and especially if you’re around the high-status world of the achievatrons, you are probably familiar with the basic rules of the form,” he writes. “The first rule is that you must never tweet about any event that could actually lead to humility. Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I went to a party, and nobody noticed me.’ Never tweet: ‘I’m humbled that I got fired for incompetence.’ The whole point of humility display is to signal that you are humbled by your own magnificent accomplishments. We can all be humbled by an awesome mountain or the infinitude of the night sky, but to be humbled by being in the presence of yourself—that is a sign of truly great humility.”

Gender Gap
Derek Thompson, writing in The Atlantic:
American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider. Last year, U.S. colleges enrolled 1.5 million fewer students than five years ago, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. Men accounted for more than 70 percent of the decline.
The statistics are stunning. But education experts and historians aren’t remotely surprised. Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s—every year, in other words, that I’ve been alive. This particular gender gap hasn’t been breaking news for about 40 years. But the imbalance reveals a genuine shift in how men participate in education, the economy, and society. The world has changed dramatically, but the ideology of masculinity isn’t changing fast enough to keep up. (Emphasis added.)

Reading
“Lest we approach our reading with a disposition of humility, hospitality, and receptivity, our reading will not of its own accord form us into ever-expanding, morally sharpened human beings we seek to become.”
…if you read a book to assert your superiority to the book you will do more damage to yourself than good. No one is wrong all the time, and if you think they are, don’t read them until you have acquired sufficient humility to receive their writing as a gift.
Scot McKnight

Reasoned Solutions
We could find reasoned solutions to many of the issues we face if we were willing to treat those who differ with dignity and grace and find solutions for the common good…but we would rather succumb in the fire and think we are noble in doing so…
Generally speaking…if you ask me a theological question, I’m going to refer you to sources to read so you can make your own conclusions…if you have no interest in doing the work…don’t ask the question…it’s obviously not that important to you, so don’t waste my time…
I have never lived in a time when people were more intellectually lazy and more convinced of their knowledge…and we wonder why things are circling the drain…
Phoenix Preacher

The Body of Christ
During the apostle Paul’s lifetime, the church was not yet an institution or structural grouping of common practices and beliefs. The church was a living organism that communicated the gospel through relationships.
Paul’s brilliant metaphor for this living, organic, concrete embodiment is the Body of Christ: “For as in one body we have many parts, and all the parts do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually parts of one another. Since we have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us exercise them” (Romans 12:4–6). At the heart of this body, providing the energy that enlivens the community is “the love of God that has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5).
Richard Rohr

View from the Front Porch
Occasionally my view gets disrupted. Recently we had a water main break. Occurring in the early morning hours, I found this scene when I came out to the porch. Our city’s maintenance crew completed repairs without any disruption for us. Waiting for the street to be patched.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George June 30, 2022 Notes Anthology 1 Comment

Roe v Wade
I have a lot of thoughts and emotions on today and in time I will share them as I parse them out. I can assure you they are multi-faceted and complex. Abortion has been an issue close to my heart for more than two decades and Bethany served many years as a crisis pregnancy counselor for various local resource centers and went through the process of an unplanned pregnancy herself which helped shape a lot of her views and subsequently many of my own. So this just can’t be a passing issue of minor theoretical relevance to me (I also was recommended to be aborted as an unborn baby myself, of which I am personally glad did not happen–albeit, point taken that I would have never known). So yes, thoughts and emotions.
That said, I want to implore people to remember this: no matter where you stand on today, it is more than likely (and if you don’t, you’re likely living in your own echo chamber) that you have a good deal of friends and loved ones that stand on the stark opposite of you as it relates to abortion. People you love, appreciate, and even respect as thoughtful people with genuine experiences and honest hearts.
Be patient. Be kind. This is a felt justice issue at all sides and simply condemning one side as being bigoted or evil stops any conversation from moving forward as they are or could equally condemn you under the same descriptors.
Unfortunately, I know people that will hang up friendships on this issue alone. And they will feel justified in doing so. But that doesn’t allow any potential listening to occur and even if you feel action is necessary, one should always be in a state of listening. If not to the ideas and thoughts that shape the perspective, to the person behind those ideas and thoughts.
Randy Hardman

A thesaurus
—here it comes—is for increasing one’s aliveness to words. Nothing more and nothing less. By going into the buzzing and jostling hive of words around a word, we get a purer sense of the word itself: its coloration, its interior, its traces of meaning. I looked up the verb excite just now and found the word in its affective (touch, move) and mechanical (electrify, galvanize) aspects. Which gets at who we are, as humans, doesn’t it? Feelings and circuitry.
As for you, blessed Mr. Roget, they say you had OCD. Of course you did. You were hooked, hung up, haunted by the hidden life of words: their selves, their stories, as told by the words they are closest to. You gave us a great gift. May you rest eternally among your synonyms.
James Parker – Atlantic

Hoofprint
You’ve heard of the carbon footprint. Now there is a development on the carbon hoofprint.
New Zealand has announced a plan to tax livestock burps in an effort to curb the country’s gas emissions.
Methane emissions from animals is a well-known issue. Cows alone are responsible for about 40% of those planet-warming gases globally — mainly through their burps.
UC Davis scientist Ermias Kebreab is something of a cow whisperer who has spent two decades studying the greenhouse gas contributions of hoofed animals.
“If you tell me how much your animal is consuming, I can tell you pretty closely to the actual emissions using mathematical models,” he said.
“Most of the gas is formed in their stomach, so in their guts, particularly in the first chamber. And so they belch it out.”
He and other scientists have developed special diets and genetic predictions that could help reduce the methane formed in cow stomachs.
Now, New Zealand could become the first country to tax its way to fewer “four-legged” emissions.
There are seven times more cows and sheep than people in New Zealand. And on Wednesday, the country’s government released a draft plan to have farmers pay for their animals’ emissions, starting in 2025.
The group recommended the government “introduce a farm-level split-gas levy on agricultural emissions with built-in incentives to reduce emissions and sequester carbon.”
Past measures to tax farmers have met strong resistance, but New Zealand’s climate change minister James Shaw thinks it is a good start.

Extremism
The prevailing operative worldview is shaped by by a view of the world seen in the extreme. Facilitated by media and technology we see the world magnified to the extreme, an equivalent of bacterial bed buddies.

Dead skin cells, sweat, saliva, and more can turn your comfy bed into a petri dish for germs to grow. For instance, lab tests found that swabs from pillowcases unwashed for a week harbored 17,000 times more colonies of bacteria than samples taken from a toilet seat.
Information that is true, when viewed in the extreme is unreal. Unreal in the sense that it does not reflect reality. It is true but not real. Reality is the sum of all parts. Bacterial bed buddies are true but they do not reflect reality. They are one minuscule part of a vast reality, which when understood in proper perspective will produce healthy outcomes… enjoying freshly washed bed linens and sleeping soundly. Magnified out of proportion they produce anxiety, fear and disproportionate responses.
Rohr puts it this way: People with a distorted image of self, world, or God will be largely incapable of experiencing what is really real in the world. They will see things through a narrow keyhole. They’ll see instead what they need reality to be, what they’re afraid it is, or what they’re angry about. They’ll see everything through their aggressiveness, their fear, or their agenda. In other words, they won’t see it at all.
Society’s (our) gross misbehavior, comes from viewing a world distorted by extremism. Ever present media depicts what is true, but seldom real. We are lost in the desert desperately pursuing a mirage, living in panic, fighting bacterial bed buddies.
I have little optimism that secular society will embrace what is true and real. My hope lies in the transcendent reality of the Kingdom of God, where what is true and real dwells.

To that end, my prayer remains,
“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
George Ezell

Prayer
A father has a young child whom he greatly loves.
Even though the child has hardly learned to speak,
           his father takes pleasure
           in listening to the child’s words.
Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

A Stained Beauty – Sexual Abuse and the Church- the Problem

George June 24, 2022 A Stained Beauty 0 Comments

This post concludes this series. The subject has not been exhausted. Hopefully, it has raised awareness of the SBC crisis and its implications for all churches. I have no illusion my posts will have much impact, but I could not not write on the subject of sexual abuse in the church.
Conversation with clergy and others outside the bible belt revealed little awareness or interest in the SBC by their congregants. I suspect that is true for most non-SBC churches in the bible belt also. As one leader expressed, “I’m glad we don’t have to deal with this.”

I believe such responses are short-sighted. As is often the case, the presented problem is not the real problem. The SBC crisis is a problem but it is only the tip of an iceberg. I applaud the reform efforts that have been approved but they address symptoms not cause.

““‘I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary. But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.”Revelation? 2:2-5 ESV (my emphasis)

The church is dying— the fragile local church,— not the Body of Christ, eternal and impervious. SBC is representative of every other church/denomination in western Christianity, not dead but on a trajectory that portends their demise. SBC by virtue of its size and influence is the leading edge of a tsunami . Receding waters that follow the initial crisis warn of what is to come. This is not a time to breathe a sigh of relief, but to repent.

That trajectory can be described in a number of ways:
— abandonment of “the love they had at first”.
— “I am the Vine, you are the branches…Separated, you can’t produce a thing. John 15 – MSG
— “..not holding fast to the Head, from whom the whole body, nourished and knit together…” Col 2:19 ESV
— “hypocrites! For you tithe mint and dill and cumin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness…” Matt 23 ESV
Each of these offer insight into how the church (we) can be headed in the wrong direction and should be the subject of self-examination.

I want to suggest another trajectory— more subtle and insidious —secularization.
Secularization, for Christians, typically brings to mind culture war issues such as abortion, homosexuality, pornography, and drug use and multiculturalism, diversity, and school curricula, to name a few. Though each is important in their own way, they are a distractions from the real problem. Charles Taylor in his tome A Secular Age defines the essence of a secular age as disenchantment. An unfamiliar term , the following is helpful in understanding disenchantment.

The default mode for the disenchanted age is reliance on human ability/reason and scientific laws as an ultimate source for answers to the problems of modernity. Utility, efficiency and production are our preimemmant tools to achieve full potential as human beings. Inherently, disenchantment rejects the transcendent. Mystery, fantasy, spirituality, faith, divinity, magic, art, namely, enchantment, is rendered irrelevant. our existence in a disenchanted age is reduced to one dimension, removing depth and meaning and distorting the purpose of our lives. (Emphasis is mine)
http://www.georgeezell.com/2019/02/defaulting-to-disenchantment/

That definition led me to make this assertion: Living in a disenchanted age is the most significant challenge we face in seeking a relationship with God. I have not changed my mind about that but have been affirmed by what is happening in Christian churches.

Expressed differently, disenchantment is loss of transcendence. Fr Stephen Freeman recently wrote about the loss of transcendence:

…a common element within human experience can be suggested by the word “transcendent.” It is an experience of beauty, of goodness, of wonder, that goes beyond itself. It demands poetry and art, songs and symbols. And despite our love of technology and the giftedness of our machines, it is the transcendent that speaks most fluently to our lives. We get out of bed in the morning because of transcendence (or so I believe). The loss of transcendence is something akin to death.
If, as I believe to be the case, we are created for wonder and transcendence, then it would seem that we are malnourished and suffer from starvation in our souls. If everything that troubles us within the “problem of evil” were to miraculously disappear, or even be diminished for the greater part, it would do nothing to nourish our souls. In a certain manner, we live in a vegetative state in which our “needs” are met while our true hunger is ignored.
The “belief” that is native to the human soul is among the casualties of the modern life-style (in all its aspects). We are not particularly nurtured with awe and wonder, but by the consumption of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Our pleasure/pain principle has created a shallow culture. In short, we do not suffer well (as in somehow becoming better, more compassionate people), nor are our pleasures remotely sublime. Two words: reality tv. We have become a people among whom the cheap-shot versions of atheism easily prosper.
The experience of belief begins, I think, with the experience of transcendence, the questions of meaning and significance. It is a conversation that struggles to find its way in a sea of commodities and mundane pleasure. We are not immune to the transcendent – but simply distracted.
https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/glory2godforallthings/2022/06/22/healing-the-soul-and-unbelief/

As a Christian, I believe there is a transcendent reality. An awareness that we exist and recognize our need for meaning and purpose which is unfulfilled in a disenchanted reality. This is our common need which can only be fulfilled in the transcendent.

Christianity, at least western Christianity, navigating a secular age has chosen a trajectory leading to increased reliance on human ability/reason and scientific laws as an ultimate source for answers to the problems of modernity. Utility, efficiency and production are our preimemmant tools to achieve full potential as human beings.

It is my contention the problem for SBC and western Christianity is loss of transcendence.
Admittedly debatable, I find no joy my conclusion. For if true, Christian faith devoid of transcendence portends fulfillment of Nietzsche’s infamous declaration, “God is dead”.
Ironically, Nietzsche believed that scientific developments and the increasing secularization of Europe had effectively ‘killed’ the Abrahamic God, who had served as the basis for meaning and value in the West for more than a thousand years. (Wikipedia)

Perhaps the Apostle John writing to today’s western churches would say: ” I have this against you, that are abandoning our transcendent GOD. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, you will lose your place in the Kingdom of God, unless you repent.”

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George June 23, 2022 Notes Anthology 1 Comment

Loving People
Theologian Gustavo Gutierrez challenges us: “So you say you love the poor. Name them.” A name is a good place to start, a meal is better, and life together is even better than that. Real love requires knowing, listening, understanding. It cannot be foisted on people from a distance.

Gregory Boyle says, “The measure of our compassion lies not in our service to others but in our willingness to see ourselves connected to them.” Love is not something that you can do to another. It is something you do with them.

Roses
RosesEveryone now and again wonders about those questions that have no readyanswers:
first cause, God’s existence, what happens when the curtain goes down and nothing stops it,
not kissing,not going to the mall, not the SuperBowl.
“Wild roses,” I said to them one morning. “Do you have the answers?
And if you do, would you tell me?”
The roses laughed softly. “Forgive us,”they said.
“But as you can see, we arejust now entirely busy being roses.”
Mary Oliver.

Something More
My dad was an artist who made his living near New York City. He painted the portraits of wealthy people and often commented on the subtleties of fine art. One day he told me that if I looked closely at the paintings of the great masters, I would see all the colors of the spectrum in every square inch. This is what gives a portrait its richness and its depth. It’s also the thing that distinguishes the work of a genius from that of an amateur.
After a while, I began to wonder whether our lives are like a portrait being painted by a renaissance artist. If our eyes are too close to the canvas, we might be confused by its complexity and wonder, “What crazy person would put every color of the spectrum in every square inch?” Our souls will focus on disappointing things and we will ask a lot of haunting questions that seem to have no answer. Most importantly, we won’t be able to make sense of the entire work of art because we are too close to the pain.

If we never experience the rude disappointments of life, it is nearly impossible for us to have the richness and depth that a masterful artist seeks to create. We will offer only trite and shallow ‘answers’ to a world that yearns for something more. Someone once said that fundamentalism is to faith what paint-by-numbers is to the Renaissance. It presents a portrait of the divine that does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. It oversimplifies the complex. Augustine said it another way, “If you can comprehend it, it is not God.”

If it were possible to have our souls painted by a renaissance artist, strange colors in strange places would appear on the canvas – each one emblematic of the events that broke us and deepened us. The richness and depth of our portraits would be reflective of a faith that has matured. It is not a paint-by-number faith. It doesn’t expect easy answers. It’s not intellectually lazy. It longs to uncover deeper and deeper layers of truth. It never attempts to domesticate God. It is wonder-struck by the mysteries that surround us. All these things bear witness to the genius of a divine painter who is still at work in us.
Will Kautz

Resurrection Hope
May God grant for each of us,
If our world has died in the night,
That we may see the first day of a new creation,
A new heaven and new earth.
Because on this day God walks again in the garden,
Not in the cool of the evening but of the dawn.
This, is our resurrection hope.
Duane W.H. Arnold

Grace is Greater than Sin
Celebrating grace is not endorsing, much less condoning, error. On the contrary, celebrating grace is holy acknowledgment of the doctrinal truth that grace is greater than our error (or sin).
Some do not believe, it seems, this truth.
“Who is a God LIKE YOU?”
The prophet places the question squarely in the context of the character of the God of Israel,
“who is a God like you,
PARDONING INIQUITY
and passing over transgression …
because he delights in showing mercy …
you will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea”
(Micah 7.18-19).
Bobby Valentine

Gospel
While the gospel is a message, it cannot be confined to messages. While the gospel is the truth, it cannot be captured by a series of propositional truths. Before the gospel is anything else, the gospel is God. Gospel means “good news,” and the good news is God. The good news is not that God loves us. The good news is that God is love. The good news is not that Jesus saves. It is that Jesus is himself salvation.
J D Walt

View from the Front Porch
A highlight of our 60th wedding anniversary celebration was having all of our children and their spouses with us. A rarity which we treasure.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

So Much To Think About

George June 16, 2022 Notes Anthology 1 Comment

The Unknown
We have been granted the capacity for constant transcendence, as an antidote, but frequently reject that capacity, because using it means voluntarily exposing ourselves to the unknown. We run away because we are afraid of the unknown…
Jordon Peterson

“When psalmist or prophet calls Israel to lift their eyes to the hills, or behold how the heavens declare the glory of God, or to listen to that unspoken tradition which day passes to day and night to night, of the knowledge of the Creator, it is not proofs to doubting minds which he offers; it is spiritual nourishment to hungry souls. These are not arguments—they are sacraments.”
Sir George Adam Smith

Some might need to hug a cow:
You may have heard of goat yoga, but cow hugging?
It’s one of the more popular activities at The Gentle Barn and involves just that, hugging a cow.
The Gentle Barn is a nonprofit that provides sanctuary for abused animals, which in turn play a role in therapy sessions for humans going through tough times.
Ellie Laks, who founded The Gentle Barn in 1999, discussed the organization’s unique approach to healing during an appearance on “Morning in America”.
“Sometimes humans are going through hard times where they don’t want to talk,” Laks said. “They don’t want to be vulnerable. They don’t want to be open. Or sometimes there are just are no words because you’re in too much pain.”

Voting Reform
Rep. Don Young’s death after nearly five decades in Congress has sparked perhaps the strangest congressional race in America, the Washington Post’s Dan Zak reports from Alaska. Recent voting reforms in the state mean that Alaskans are set to cast “four votes, using two methods, over three time periods, in two races, for the same seat” —

Wrong about Something
If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that everything and everyone will, at some point, be wrong about something very significant. It doesn’t matter where your politics are, what your country is, what your personal beliefs or risk tolerances are—at some point in the last three years, you and I were wrong about something. And, in many cases, horribly wrong. Therefore, it’s safe to assume that you and I will be horribly wrong about something again.
You would think this would humble people a little bit and encourage them to withhold judgment about things. But it appears to have done the opposite instead.

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” But I’d like to add to Hanlon’s Razor something I’ll call Manson’s Addendum: “…and pretty much everything you see or read is some degree of stupidity.”
But as the world becomes highly polarized and angrier and disinformation spreads in every direction, I think the ability to reserve moral judgment and be slow to draw conclusions may become the next critical new skill necessary to survive in the Twitter-driven world.
Mark Manson

JOY
Tonight I sit by a campfire with my husband. The JOY of the evening is the opportunity to spend a little time away from life. As always, the veil of sadness is present as the realization that the last time I went camping all of my children were not only alive; they were all with us.
Upon arrival, my mind instinctively felt the need to holler out to the kids to go gather firewood. In a fraction of a second I remembered our children are not with us; those days are gone. So, off I went to complete the task previously done by my children.
I walked through the woods gathering firewood; leaves crunching and twigs snapping with every step. In the silence of nature my mind could literally hear, with great clarity, the voices of my children as they sounded when we were last together; together as a complete family. “Hey, Mom! I found a good one!” “Mooooommmm! He took my stick!”
Beautiful memories representing the dichotomy of JOY and grief. Do I choose to focus on the JOY or or do i choose to focus on the grief? The answer is both. I cling to both for one without the other leaves a void. Grief without JOY is devastating. JOY without grief hollow. A healthy mix of the two affords a broken heart the opportunity to live a beautiful life despite the pain.
Tonight I sit by the fire; I choose to savor the past AND the present. Me, my husband, grief, and JOY. The four of us sitting by a campfire, drinking wine from Solo cups, hanging out, loving life, reminiscing, and making new memories every chance we get.
Melissa Gabehart

Spirit of the Age
…the spirit of the age works through highly functional impatient activism with the attitude, “Don’t just stand there, do something!” In contrast, the Spirit of Jesus works through deeply submitted atunement with the adage, “Don’t just do something, stand there.” It so often takes the posture of standing there, or kneeling there, to even begin to comprehend the transcendent interpolation taking place, and what it might mean. Let’s remember on the Mount of Transfiguration, Peter wanted to hurry and build three tabernacles. Meanwhile, the voice of God said simply and incisively, “This is my son, whom I love. Listen to him!”
J D Walt

Now I know what the problem is…
“Pretty soon it will be women preachers, social justice, then racism, then [critical race theory], then victimization because the world is a ball and chain, and when you’re hooked, it will take you to the bottom. They hate the truth,” John MacArthur

In case you didn’t know…
a New York court ruled on Tuesday that elephants are not people. At issue was whether Happy, in captivity at the Bronx Zoo for more than four decades, could be released to a sanctuary through a habeas corpus proceeding. “Because the writ of habeas corpus is intended to protect the liberty right of human beings to be free of unlawful confinement,” Chief Judge Janet DiFiore wrote for the majority, “it has no applicability to … a nonhuman animal who is not a ‘person’ subjected to illegal detention.”

Once upon a time, our problem was guilt:
the feeling that you have made a mistake, with reference to something forbidden. This was felt as a stain on one’s character…[Today] the dichotomy of the forbidden and the allowed has been replaced with an axis of the possible and the impossible. The question that hovers over your character is no longer that of how good you are, but of how capable you are, where capacity is measured in something like Kilowatt hours–the raw capacity to make things happen. With this shift comes a new pathology. The affliction of guilt has given way to weariness–weariness with the vague and unending project of having to become one’s fullest self. We call this depression.
Matthew Crawford

Who’s Leaving the Church the Most?
Single evangelical women, according to the sources used by Katie Gaddini, book, The Struggle to Stay: Why Single Evangelical Women are Leaving the Church (Columbia UP, 2022). Single evangelical women are leaving the white church more than any demographic.
If women make up 55-60% of the evangelical church, what does their leaving of the church say about the future of the church?
Scot McKnight

Worship & Lament
As I reflected on the way my church worshipped, its emphasis, its tone, its expectations, its expressed hopes, I suddenly understood clearly that there was no room in our liturgy and worship for sadness, brokenness and questioning. We had much space for love, joy, praise, and supplica- tion, but it seemed that we viewed acknowledgement of sadness and the tragic brokenness of our world as almost tantamount to faithlessness. As a result, when tragedy hit: either directly at home or at a slight distance as in the Omagh bombing, we had no idea what to do with it or how to formulate our concerns… It was clear that we had few resources to enable us to resist the evil caused by such outrageous suffering as was inflicted on the people of Omagh on that terrible day. So we closed our eyes and worshipped God, or at least those aspects of God that brought us more comfort and relief.
Swinton, Raging with Compassion, pp. 92-93.

View from the Front Porch
The image is from a section of the 1950 census of my neighborhood on the TVA reservation where we lived. Shared by a friend on FB it was interesting, particularly the notation of the husbands as head. I’ve been thinking a lot about that.

STILL ON THE JOURNEY