Countdown Day 51
Many people read the Bible as a series of disconnected quotes and episodes yielding maxims, rules, formulas, anecdotes, propositions, and wise sayings. They have little or no sense of the larger story into which the statements fit and in which their meaning took shape. (19)
From A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (available February 9, 2010)
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Pregnancy, birth, and a new kind of Christianity … part 3
Unsurprisingly, some women - reflecting on pregnancy, birth, advent, and/or the birth of new spiritual awareness in us - resorted to poetry ...
My friend Cheryl Lawrie in Melbourne sent a link to this beautiful poem ...
And another friend, Amy Daws, sent in another beautiful poem - included in its entirety after the jump.
Another reader sent in this short but worthwhile insight ...
I have not yet been pregnant myself (although as I am getting married
next year I hope one day to be!) but something struck me about
pregnancy as a metaphor/experience of faith: what about the days
before you even know you're pregnant? And what about when you
intellectually are, but don't "feel" it yet? Those both seem to me
rather like the mysterious way God secretly begins to work in us.
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Countdown Day 52
As we come near the end of 2009, I am especially thankful to all of you who have shared in the "questions, conversations, and friendships" in my life this year, as referenced below in today's countdown quote. Thank you, thanks be to God for you, and God bless you in 2010!
Taken together, those questions, conversations, and friendships have the potential simultaneously to weaken old, rigid paradigms and to help us imagine new and better possibilities. (19)
From A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions That Are Transforming the Faith (available February 9, 2010)
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Michael Gerson gets it right on the Ugandan homosexuality law …
You can read his insightful comments here. Quotable:
We refused to be a "Christian nation" precisely because the founders held a broadly Christian view of human beings, who are subject to God and their conscience, not to the state. Pluralism is not a temporary or tragic compromise; it is the proper way to treat men and women created free and autonomous in God's image.
... It is not cultural imperialism to criticize an oppressive law in Uganda, any more than in Iran or Saudi Arabia. It is consistency. And it is not colonialism for nations that donate to the fight against AIDS in Uganda to be disturbed about policies that make this effort more difficult. Uganda is on a path of self-isolation that will hurt its people.
Religious citizens often bring strong moral convictions into public life. One of those convictions should be pluralism.
If the law passes - and I hope and pray that it doesn't, only those without sin should cast the first stone.
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Reflections on Oslo, Part 2
As I suggested in my previous post, I was troubled by some elements of the President's recent Oslo speech. But recent statements by former-VP Dick Cheney have helped me appreciate a key element of the speech that I enthusiastically applaud. (More after the jump...)
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