Before Holy Mountain

  Originally posted as a Facebook Note April 25, 2012. Litter (from Wikimedia commons) Yesterday afternoon I was meeting with some of my students at Brewed Awakenings when a driver on 1st Av caught my eye. He was driving a biggish car, stopped at the light at College Drive, and was trying to throw what looked like a Twix wrapper out the passenger side window. He threw it once... bounced back. Threw it again... bounced back. Finally, on the third attempt, he succeeded in throwing his trash out of his car and into the neighborhood.   Litterbugs disgust me, because of the utter needlessness of what they do. Hydraulic fracturing and clear-cutting--and driving cars, for that matter--are bad for the environment, but they have compensating value (energy, timber, transportation). All littering gets the sociopath who commits it is some momentary convenience. (Problem for libertarians: Even a marginal benefit to the individual in this case results in real cost to the society. The logic ...

  Originally published as a Facebook Note January 21, 2012. Our adult Sunday school class has been reading the book The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith by theologian Marcus J. Borg (HarperOne, 2003). I enjoy Borg’s work, and that of his often-collaborator, John Dominic Crossan; even if you don’t agree with their perspectives, they do a valiant job of unpacking a lot of the baggage Christianity has acquired over the centuries. In chapter four of The Heart of Christianity , Borg describes two concepts of God (citing the work of Karen Armstrong as he does so). He uses the terms supernatural theism and panentheism . The first might be termed “God classic,” though he maintains it is only in the last few hundred years that it has come to dominate Christian thinking. God is a person, usually male, who exists above and apart from His creation; He intervenes in creation, at least occasionally, typically in response to intercessory prayer.[1] It stresses God’s judgmen...

  Originally published as a Facebook Note February 23, 2010. My church--MY church, which is into love and tolerance, and is practically universalist--having inserted a snide remark about separation of church and state into an otherwise charming children's musical last weekend, I thought I would undertake to defend this bedrock American principle. The words "separation of church and state" do not appear in the Constitution. They encompass the principles of two clauses of the First Amendment, which prevent Congress from making any "law respecting an establishment," and "prohibiting free exercise" of religion. For most of our history, these were fairly innocuous and uncontroversial, largely because Protestants ruled and everyone else put up with it. More recently "establishment clause" jurisprudence got a whole lot more interesting, because (a) beginning in 1947 courts have held states as well as Congress to its standard, and (b) around the same...

  Originally published as a Facebook Note May 17, 2009. I have been blissfully complacent about the extent to which I have a theology, and the extent to which said theology can be challenged by Darwin. I've found that, the less I try to reduce religion to a series of true-false statements, the better I get along with God, so I thought I had come to an 'anti-theology' theology, which was about as minimalist and accommodating as you could possibly be while still taking religion seriously (see one of my previous notes). I have also managed to get along with Charles Darwin throughout my life. It is interesting to speculate how I would have dealt with Darwin 150 years ago. If I had been born 150 years earlier than I already was, I would have been about my present age when The Origin of Species was published. Could I have accommodated Darwin into my worldview? But I was born into liberal theology, and have not had to struggle with that. Then along came two books, both about...

  Originally posted as a Facebook Note March 31, 2009. Some time ago I was asked by our fearless class leader to lead two adult Sunday school classes on the topic of sacramental living. This was not anything to which I had given any thought at all, and I may have misunderstood the topic. However, the dates eventually came, and I put something together. The first step, given that I've been hanging around churches all my life but have spent zero time thinking about sacraments, was to figure out what they were. Augustine called them a "visible sign of an invisible reality," though they are not specifically depictions of God. All religions have some aspects we could call sacramental. Traditional Christianity had (has, in the case of the Roman Catholic Church) seven sacraments: baptism, penance, confirmation, communion, marriage, holy orders, and extreme unction (last rites). United Methodism, among other Protestant churches, recognizes only two: baptism and communion, ...

  First published as a Facebook Note on February 19, 2008. We had a discussion this week in our (adult) church school class about United Methodist doctrine. We are a bunch of rather unorthodox Christians, so it took us awhile to get to this question, but take it on we did. Someone found us a copy of the basic United Methodist doctrine, which is comprised of a revised (1808) version of John Wesley's Doctrinal Rules, along with the 1963 Confession of Faith of the Evangelical United Brethren Church (promulgated just a few years before their union with the Methodist Church). I've been a Methodist all my life, except for a two-year vacation in the early 1990s, and this was the first time I'd encountered either, which I think speaks volumes about the importance of doctrine in the United Methodist Church. Wesley's rules are either hilarious or embarrassing, depending on your mood. They mainly seem designed to distinguish Methodism from the Anglican Church from which w...