Theolog

Walking a labyrinth

By Richard A. Kauffman

Recently I spent several days at the Taizé community in southeastern France. Taizé has three daily “prayers” that are largely sung, using repetitive chant-like songs. The community draws visitors from all over the world, especially youth and young adults from Europe. There must have been close to 1,000 guests present the week I was there.

One day at the end of the noon prayers I decided to remain in the sanctuary while the worshipers processed out. We were singing over and over again the chant, “Bless the Lord, my soul, and praise God’s holy name. Bless the Lord, my soul, who leads me in to life.” As fewer and fewer people were left to sing it, the song got slower and slower, but with fewer people in the sanctuary there was more of an echo, so the response time was longer, and the slow pace seemed appropriate. Hearing a few people keeping the song going was incredible, and a small, earthly reminder that the praises of God will go on for eternity.

Love, don't judge

By Louis R. Carlozo

Not long before his death, Jerry Falwell, the Religious Right’s resident lightning rod and 800 lb. theological/political gorilla, crowed that the concern over the environment was a demonic distraction from the “real” issues of the day, including gay marriage. It’s not my job to dissect the moral “right versus wrong” of homosexuality. But many homosexuals are Christians. Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether you embrace the concept of the “more light” church or try to call a technical foul by waving the Book of Romans around like a Pharisee dressed in a referee’s outfit—no Christian should be claiming the moral authority to take away a person’s proclaimed faith in Jesus.

Gothic, finery, and ecumenism

By Jason Byassee

There’s nothing unusual today about a Protestant church in America that’s built in a gothic architectural style, although a recently published book shows this was not always the case. In fact, Protestants once repudiated not only gothic architecture, but also crosses, choir robes, liturgical seasons, altar tables and even flowers (!) in their worship. All of these were too “Romish” and “popish” for evangelical forebears. Start building gothic churches and pretty soon you’ll be wearing a chasuble and elevating a host.

Blogging toward Sunday

By Debbie Blue
Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31
Sunday, June 3 (Trinity Sunday)

Wisdom seems like something you find after many years, something elusive, like an old Indian in a cave in the desert. You might have to fast if you want to get a glimpse of her, or trek up to an altitude of 20,000 feet to a Buddhist monastery in Nepal, lead a contemplative life, do lots of reading. So it’s surprising to open up the book of Proverbs and find Wisdom in the busiest place in town—“beside the gates…at the entrance of the portals”—perhaps even at the market, where people go to sell things and buy things. We can imagine someone hocking watches to her left, a hot dog vendor to her right. She’s indiscriminate—she calls out to the dullards, the dolts and the fools, offering her companionship to ANYONE, being AVAILABLE and LOUD, a woman yelling in the street.

Troops, torture and tattling

By John Dart

News services carried stories in early May about a Pentagon study that found many of the U.S. Marines and soldiers in Iraq would support torture in attempts to get strategic information and would not report on a comrade for killing or wounding civilians. General David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, reminded service members that keeping high moral values “distinguishes us from our enemy” and is vital to winning support among Iraqis.

Hearing a call to the monastic life?

By Debra Bendis

Abbot Primate Notker Wolf, the highest representative of the Benedictine Order, traveled from Sant’Anselmo (the International Pontifical Benedictine University in Rome) last week to speak at the first-year anniversary of the newly created ecumenical Benedictine community—Holy Wisdom Monastery in Middleton, Wisconsin.

Jesus and jihad

By Jason Byassee

Marilynne Robinson is perhaps the most widely read theologian presently working in America. Of course she is not an academic theologian. But she is a serious reader of Calvin and reckoner with the divine. Undoubtedly more people have read her Pulitzer-winning novel Gilead and her astonishing review of Richard Dawkins in Harpers (November 2006) than have read any writer currently working in the theological academy. She is scathingly impatient both with hasty dismissals of religion (Darwinism is a favorite bête noir for her) and with hasty impositions of it (by, say, evangelicals).

Blogging toward Sunday

By Debbie Blue
Genesis 11: 1-9
May 27 (Pentecost Sunday)

The story of the Tower of Babel seems to have such enduring and diverse cultural resonance that when it shows up in the lectionary, I have a hard time leaving it alone.

The Tower, according to Tarot card readers, is the scariest card in the deck. It means that the foundations of someone’s well-constructed world are about to shatter. In the Yu-gi-oh deck, it is a “trap” card. (My son couldn’t explain to me what that means, but it seemed worth noting.) According to Ernest Becker, skycrapers are blatant expressions of humanity’s futile attempt to deny death. Franz Kafka has been called the modern heir of the Tower of Babel story because he writes about huge life-sucking systems, including institutions that consume everything and everybody in a futile enterprise from which there is no escape.

Falwell: consistently wrong

By David Heim

Jerry Falwell apparently had personal charm. He was a genial debater and (as John Dart reports below) was unusually open to the media. Clearly he was a decisive figure in bringing Christian conservatives into political life.

Yet amid the respectful statements made by many church leaders at his death, this also has to be said: few people were more consistently wrong on the major issues of the day than Jerry Falwell.

Falwell: glib and quotable

By John Dart

In 1989, Jerry Falwell agreed to be “roasted” by the Religion Newswriters Association, a rare event for journalists who cover religion for the secular press. I donned a dress and wig to play comic Dana Carvey’s prissy “Church Lady,” who saw the devil behind everything. Among other lines, I asked Falwell why his Liberty sports teams were nicknamed “Flames.” “Could it be Say-tan?!” I asked. He took it well, and had rejoinders ready in his response.

Publicity or perish

By Jeffrey S. Rogers

When Hollywood producer and director James Cameron served as the master of ceremonies for the unveiling of the limestone “bone boxes” from Jerusalem, he announced: “I’m not a biblical scholar . . . but it seemed pretty darn compelling.” Imagine if Cameron had said, “I’m not an astronomer or a biologist, but this Canadian filmmaker has discovered life on Mars. It’s pretty darn compelling.” Would anyone but National Enquirer run the story? Or if he had said, “I’m not a viral epidemiologist, but this Canadian filmmaker has discovered an herbal antidote for HIV. It’s pretty darn compelling.” That’s the stuff of Star Magazine. But because this story was allegedly about Jesus of Nazareth, the bar is set so low that tabloid claims and celebrity endorsements are all that are necessary to merit widespread attention.

Blogging toward Sunday

In this series, authors offer reflections on the Sunday lectionary texts.

By Walter Brueggemann
Sunday, May 13
Acts 1:1-11 (Ascension Day)

On this special day the gospel reading departs from the sequence of Fourth Gospel texts in order to make the connection between Jesus’ Lucan appearance to the disciples (34:44-53) and the narrative that begins the Book of Acts (1:1-11). The two texts together present the drama of Jesus, who departs, mandates the disciples, and promises to return.

Tribute to a pastoral theologian

By Jason Byassee

I never actually met Robert Webber, who died a few weeks ago, but I’ve been around institutions he changed forever. His influence is still palpable at Wheaton College, where he taught for decades. Many alumni trace their careers in academic theology directly to his influence, while many current students who’ve never read him have become Anglican—demonstrating the continuing viability of the trend Webber traced in his Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. At a Wheaton theology conference on Ancient/Future Faith (another of his 40-odd book titles), everything that speakers had to say about the church’s need to recover theology, exegesis, worship and life from the early church seemed a footnote to Webber.

Binocular vision

By Jonathan Marlowe

"No hard feelings," she said, "but I need a religious community that allowed me to think for myself. I got to the point that I can no longer hold all the old Christian beliefs enshrined in those ancient creeds. I need something that embraces science."

She was explaining her gradual drift away from our United Methodist congregation to a Unitarian-Universalist church down the road. I was caught off guard and stumbled through my response. "We believe in science, too!" I stammered, but the issues were already settled in her mind. Perhaps if I’d have known who John Polkinghorne was, we might at least have had a more interesting conversation.

Excommunicate George W.?

By Donald Shriver Jr.

In Torture and Eucharist (1998), William T. Cavanaugh argues that a government that "disappears" citizens and tortures them is sinning against human bodies destined for incorporation into the Body of Christ. Therefore anyone in government who conducts, orders or condones torture must be publicly called to repentance by the church. If unrepentant, they should be excommunicated. Cavanaugh believes the Catholic Church of Chile should have excommunicated General Pinochet in the early 1970s.

Has the United Methodist Church considered any such action against our Methodist president?

Evangelicals and Princeton

By Jason Byassee

Princeton has always been a place associated with names from a who’s who of religion and politics in America: Charles Hodge, Gresham Machen, B. B. Warfield at the seminary; Woodrow Wilson, John Foster Dulles, Donald Rumsfeld at the University, to name just a few. Ellen Charry and Beverly Roberts Gaventa at the Seminary and Jeff Stout at the university, great theological scholars that they are, must feel the weight of such traditions of theological learning on their shoulders.

Blogging toward Sunday

In this series, authors offer reflections on the Sunday lectionary texts.

By Walter Brueggemann
Sunday, May 13
Acts 16:9-15

Here is a narrative in which a vision leads to a new practical beginning. Paul was ready for a vision. He was seeking a way of ministry “out of no way.” That new way was given “in a vision,” a perception of reality outside the ordinary and beyond all conventionalism. This “chief apostle” is “on the loose,” unencumbered and ready for what is given by God—not a bad characterization of the church and its ministry when that ministry is not imprisoned in old thought categories or paralyzed by its traditions (or its property).

No-longer-hard passages of scripture

By Timothy Larsen

As an earnest Christian teenager I remember asking a Bible professor if there were any parts of scripture that troubled him. He felt that it was his duty to shore up my confidence in God’s word and therefore responded with a resounding and unequivocal “No” and a little, upbeat speech to underline his answer. I decided he was not the teacher I needed.

On the other side of the account, during that same period of my life, I remember being delighted when a Christian publisher came out with a series of books on “The Hard Sayings” of the Bible. It was equally apologetic in intent, but its conceptual framework was reassuring. It conceded, even in its title, that when we read the Bible devotionally we sometimes came across things that disturb us.

I have also discovered another phenomenon: the no-longer-hard passages of scripture.

Healed by the Spirit?

By Jason Byassee

My friend’s daughter was recently cured of a lifelong, debilitating medical condition. Really.

All her life she’s been allergic to milk products. She could break out in a rash if another child at the same table blew bubbles in his milk. Fortunately for her, her family is Pentecostal, which seems to mean the Spirit listens to their prayers.