Category: Notes Anthology

  My tolerance for idiots is extremely low these days. I used to have some immunity built up, but obviously, there’s a new strain out there.

---

We become what we see

pornographic gaze vs sacramental gaze 

This vision is “sacramental” as we come to behold invisible, spiritual truths shining though material reality. Proper Christian vision participates in a “sacramental ontology,” where we see a world “charged with the grandeur of God.” The sacramental gaze creates a sacred encounter. To see with the eyes of the heart incarnates a relation of love. 

The pornographic gaze is greedy, consumptive, and objectifying. The pornographic gaze is iconoclastic perception, a form of perceptual violence, as it rips the sacred from the material. In the thought of Martin Buber, the pornographic gaze creates an objectifying and deadening I-It relation with the world.  By contrast, the sacramental gaze beholds an I-Thou relation, a meeting with a holy other. 

to “make a covenant with my eyes” is, rather, learning to envision the world correctly, rejecting an I-It relation for an I-Thou relation, as we gaze at each other. In rejecting the pornographic gaze in favor of the sacramental gaze, we come to see the world with the eyes of our heart.

I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which he has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, Ephesians 1:18

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2022/08/a-covenant-with-my-eyes-part-3-seeing.html

---

The Presence of God

Adapted from Walter Brueggemann’s description of Freedom, 

Living Toward a Vision page 41 

There is something hidden and mysterious about the Presence of God. It is like manna in that it is always a gift given, and never a product controlled and understood. Like manna, it is not something that cam be stored up and taken for granted, because then it turns sour and we don’t have it anymore. It states the heart of our faith and our greatest temptation.  : Yet at the same time those who do not care for, nurture, and celebrate God’s Presence when it is given are likely not to enjoy it very long. 

---

Avoiding Death

When we avoid thoughts of death, we unconsciously assume that tomorrow will look a lot like today, so we can do tomorrow what we could do today. But when we focus on death, that increases the stakes at play in the present, and clarifies what we should do with our time.

If you insist on ignoring your own demise, you are likely to make decisions that cause you to sleepwalk through life. You may not be dead yet, but you’re not fully alive either.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/death-memento-mori-happiness/674158/

---

Is pluralism a Christian ethic ?

Pluralists seek to replace the demonizing, demeaning and dividing ethos with one that encourages respect, relationships and cooperation. Pluralists believe that people’s identities are complex and shifting, that most human beings shouldn’t be divided into good/evil categories, that we become wise as we enter into many different points of view. Patel says that universities shouldn’t be battlefields but potluck dinners, where all guests bring their own cuisines to the common table.

David Brooks

---

Prayer is the work

…the battle is fought in prayer. We don’t pray for the battle. Prayer is the battle. Prayer is the place where justification and sanctification happen., An old preacher told me once that he really began to understand “justification” when he was working construction one summer.  As he would place a stud in the wall of the home they were building, either he or his partner would have to step off and hold up a plum line to make sure the stud was straight. One day, he said, he finally understood this was what the Spirit was doing to him in prayer. The Spirit would hold up the plum line of Christ against his life and then hammer him straight in the places he didn’t line up with Jesus. 

When we leave our prayers, we should be totally aligned with what God is doing in us and through us. You can’t do that in a few minutes a day. That takes a while.

Mike Glenn

---

Love your enemies

…brain scans show how powerfully social identity can shape our emotional response to situations. …

For example, if someone sees a comrade in pain — a fellow member of one’s group — the brain will react with empathy. “My brain would simulate the suffering of the other person by reactivating how I feel when I am feeling bad,” Klimecki explains.

But, instead, if it is an adversary experiencing pain, not only is the same empathetic region of the brain not as active, she says, “we also sometimes see more activation related to schadenfreude or malicious joy.”

Olga Klimecki, a neurology researcher, via Scot Mknight

---

the biggest threat to faith

“clean hands and a pure heart” Ps 24

…the biggest threat to faith in the modern world is what I call “the mystical-to-moral shift.” We believe that goodness is the goal of faith, rather than seeking God. This moralization and politicization of faith, given how politics is increasingly becoming an arena of moral identity and performance, instrumentalizes God and the life of faith. God becomes a tool to become good, faith an instrument for a political agenda, church a technique for moral self-improvement. 

Phrased differently, God is perceived as means and goodness as the end. We believe in God, go to church, pray, read our Bibles, follow the Golden Rule all in order to become a good person, increasingly a politically inflected vision of a good person.

This instrumentalizing of faith undermines faith because, as we all know, you can be good without God. And you don’t need to believe in God to vote well. There are many non-religious ways to become a good person or subscribe to the proper politics. And if you don’t need God, faith or church to be good, well, what’s the point? If you can get to the end by other means, God, as a moral or political tool, can be left behind. 

Richard Beck

---

Islamification of the faith

Islamification of the faith. I have written before of the influence of Islam on the notion of Sola Scriptura. Christianity, viewed as essentially an act of submission to God through Christ, is not Christianity. It is a Christianized Islam. It’s useful. It need have none of the problems concomitant with a genuine historical Church. It is quite portable and can be kept entirely private, offering no disturbance to the structures and agreements of the secular world. Individual Christians are never a problem for the world. It’s only when two or three of them gather together that they become dangerous.

Fr Stephen Freeman

---

Faith

“faith.” We often assume that the Greek word pistis means something thin, as in “belief.” To have “faith” is to “believe.”

But pistis (faith) means something much more than “belief.” Pistis is better translated as fidelity, faithfulness, loyalty, and allegiance. To have faith means to keep faith — to hold fast, to endure, to remain, to stay, to never falter or betray. Faith is an inseverable bond. An unbreakable promise. An unshakable commitment. An unwavering loyalty. Faith is courage, endurance, and steely resolve. Faith is the blood of the martyrs.

Another way to think about this, especially faith-as-allegiance, is that, in the Biblical imagination, there is no space for free moral agency. Every space has a Power or a Lord. The only option before you, therefore, is to whom you will swear allegiance. As Bob Dylan sang, “You’ve gotta serve somebody.”

This is why the opposite of faith isn’t “unbelief” but idolatry — betraying your love, breaking your promise, serving another lord. And again, the issue of idolatry isn’t here a mental game, a game of “believing” in this or that. Idolatry, says the theologian William Cavanaugh, is less about your metaphysical or ontological beliefs than a lifestyle that betrays your fundamental allegiances:  

Richard Beck

---

Only in kentucky

…state law allows for secret recordings as long as one party is aware of it …

---

Compassionate Heart
– definition: A person who is standing in snow with the temperature at 12 degrees who feels compassion for those who are in Florida standing in the rain with the temperature at 35 degrees. 

---

Tradition

Our humanity is a tradition. I can only learn what it is to be a human being from another human being, someone who has successfully fulfilled that reality. Animals are no different. Birds do not suddenly fly – their flight is traditioned to them. Human beings learn to walk in a traditioned manner as well. Your computer or your phone will not teach you how to be a human being.

Fr Stephen Freeman 

Seduction of Crowds

the seduction of crowds is a hunger for transcendence. Getting swept up in a group can be ecstatic, temporarily filling the hole in your soul. But such transcendence is temporary, addictive, and prone to corruption. Belonging to the group becomes more important than the reason the group was created in the first place. 

Jonah Goldberg

---

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

First you forget names, then you forget faces. Then you forget to pull up your zipper.  It’s even worse when you forget to pull it down.

---

Aging

…my great friend Father Terry Richey said, it’s not about trying harder; it’s about resisting less. This is right up aging’s alley. Some days are sweet, some are just too long.

Anne Lamott

---

SOME THINGS FOR YOU TO THINK ABOUT

Sometimes being hard on someone is the most helpful thing you can do for them. Sometimes being nice to someone is the most unhelpful thing you can do for them.

Nice is not always the same as good.

Choosing to be nice is strength. Feeling compelled to always be nice is weakness.

Choosing when to be disagreeable, when required, is strength. Always being disagreeable is weakness.

Mark Manson

---

Learning to see and love what is

…many people think religion has to do with ideas and concepts and formulas from books. That’s how clergy and theologians were trained for years. We went away, not into a world of nature and silence and primal relationships, but into a world of books. Well, that’s not biblical spirituality, and that’s not where religion begins. It begins in observing “what is.” Paul says, “Ever since the creation of the world, the invisible essence of God and God’s everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding of created things” (Romans 1:20). We know God through the things that God has made. The first foundation of any true religious seeing is, quite simply, learning how to see and love what is. Contemplation is meeting reality in its most simple and direct form unjudged, unexplained, and uncontrolled!

Richard Rohr

---

Magic

The magic we find is rarely the magic we expect, yet it exists more often than not, given our openness to its presence. Be there.

Eric Alan

---

Women in ministry

In Christian ministry, how do men and women partner in ministry, as co-pastors or part of a team, without falling into several traps.

By traps, I mean things like:

(a) Treating women as honorary men;
(b) Making token appointments of women to positions of junior leadership;
(c) Assuming that men need a warning sign, “May break into patriarchy at any moment,”
(d) Thinking that some gifts come in pink or blue; and
(e) Failing to recognize that gifts are exercised not despite gender but precisely through it, that is, as men and women who serve the churches.
(f) Putting women on a different pay scale.

Michael Bird

---

Christian

Too few Christians add value to the precious title of “Christian.” We take the Name, and by our choices, make the Name mean nothing. 

Someone who bears the name has come to terms with their own brokenness and failures. A Christian is someone who recognizes they can’t fix what is broken within them nor repair the damage they’ve done in others. A Christ follower has realized that Jesus and Jesus alone understands the best way to live life and He alone, has the power, grace, mercy and love needed to make something new out of our wreckage. 

Mike Glenn

---

The place of truth at funerals

But here’s the problem with blocking out the flaws of the person who died: Choosing to remember only the good provides a false sense of reality. Remembering the good only allows us to remember and think about the person in pieces. It doesn’t allow space for us to think about the person as a whole.”
https://experiencecamps.org/blog/why-we-need-to-remember-the-flaws-along-with-the-good-those-who-die#:~:text=Here%27s%20what%20she%20had%20to,and%20joyful%20experiences%20with%20them.

---

Competence

Competence is how good you are when there is something to gain. Character is how good you are when there is nothing to gain.

People will reward you for competence. But people will only love you for your character.

It’s hard enough to be competent. It’s even harder to have character. Do you believe you’re someone of character? Are you able to do the right thing or do something well when no one is looking or when there is nothing to gain?

Mark Manson

---

Decline of Religiosity

There is no doubt that the percentage of American adults who said they had no religion nearly doubled between 2007 and the early 2020s. What is the reason for this?

I think that the answer is that the people who are leaving Christianity are doing so primarily because they no longer find Christianity morally credible. They don’t think they need religion in order to be moral people, and they don’t think that the moral fabric of the country depends on a set of values sustained by religious faith. This is a new phenomenon, because for most of the nation’s history, large numbers of Americans did believe that the country’s moral values were inextricably tied to religion, just as George Washington suggested in his Farewell Address. But when people’s faith in the moral authority of Christianity disappears, they leave the church.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2023/10/american-secularization-hasnt-followed-the-script-that-secularization-theory-would-predict/

---

Fulfillment of Prophecy 

this must be said, whether from the pulpit or not: every precise fulfillment of some Bible verse (understood as) prophetic prediction so far has been shown not to be a fulfillment. Put more bluntly, the predictors have all been wrong about every prediction so far. They need to stop. We need to stop. Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Gorbachev, Putin, et al. – none were THE antichrist. None. WWI, WWII, the Six Day War, the oil crisis, you name it, each has been ramped up with apocalyptic expectations and every last one – name them all – has been wrongly connected to the end of history. The approach is entirely wrong.

Scot McKnight

---

Divine Providence

I have come to think that the doctrine of divine providence is more readily seen by the old than by the young. For the old, most of life is “in the rear-view mirror,” while, for the young, it rushes towards the windshield at ever-increasing speeds. In hindsight, the hand of God seems clear, and, mostly, unmistakable. It is a mysterious working, particularly when I see good come out of seeming evil.

Fr Stephen Freeman

---

STILL ON THE JOURNEY