But it isn’t a translation if you start making the stuff up!
Pyromaniacs lets the world know about some <sarc>quality</sarc> Biblical scholarship going on out there!
*now back to my Greek textbook. Consonantal Iota 3rd Declension Nouns, here I come!
I’ve always thought that the Jewish people avoided going onto the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to avoid angering the Palestinians. Well, I was wrong (at least when it comes to the zionist segments of the population.) Here’s the reason, according to Haaretz, an Israeli daily:
… most rabbis prohibited Jews from going to the Temple Mount because no one knows for sure the exact location of the Holy of Holies, and the concern that today’s Jews, considered “impure” by Jewish law, would enter prohibited zones.
However this opinion certainly doesn’t go unchallenged, from the same paper.
Today’s Taste and See article from John Piper addresses the recent Supreme Court ruling on partial birth abortions, it has this (hopefully prophetic, that we are indeed “waking up”) quote:
This use of catch phrases is surely tired. “Right to choose.” “Equal rights for women.” The grandchildren of the sixties are waking up to the vagueness and danger of those phrases. Right to choose what? Anything? All laws that protect children limit the rights of moms (and dads) to choose. You can’t choose to starve them. You can’t choose to lock them in closets for three weeks. You can’t choose to abandon them. You can’t choose to strangle them five minutes after they are born.
Read more (includes an emotionally rough quote from Justice Kennedy)
I stopped posting about what I like to call “chrisitians behaving badly,” but today I must post again (pedophile pastors and swindling sextons get a little old after a while.)
At the American Repertory Theater down in Cambridge a monologue was interrupted by a surreal act of “christian” [cowardice, avarice, malice, spite, bad taste, mass-hysteria], I don’t even know what to say, except I’m sorry. A group of “christians” walked out on a Performance of Mike Daisey’s invincible summer, but did so in a most disturbing fashion.
From Mike’s own blog posting (comments on the ART’s blog):
Last night’s performance of INVINCIBLE SUMMER was disrupted when eighty seven members of a Christian group walked out of the show en masse, and chose to physically attack my work by pouring water on and destroying the original of the show outline.
I’m still dealing with all the ramifications, but here’s what it felt like from my end: I am performing the show to a packed house, when suddenly the lights start coming up in the house as a flood of people start walking down the aisles–they looked like a flock of birds who’d been startled, the way they all moved so quickly, and at the same moment…it was shocking, to see them surging down the aisles. The show halted as they fled, and at this moment a member of their group strode up to the table, stood looking down on me and poured water all over the outline, drenching everything in a kind of anti-baptism.
FYI, there’s some foul language in the clip, if you’re so inclined to avoid that, please do.
Thanks to BoingBoing
This is from yesterday’s game (final 7-2, Sox).
He should be grateful, in Philly they’d have thrown something a whole lot harder.
Like some sick and twisted death-match on late night Spike TV, both the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and The Episcopal Church are struggling to define the role of homosexuals within both the congregational life and in pastoral life - with liberals and conservatives occupying trenches equally deep and well planned. I’m not here to comment on that sad affair that is literally killing the churches mission (can you imagine how much these denominations could accomplish if they would talk
about something else at their annual meetings?), but rather I want to point out something obvious that vexes me about these institutions. These are both national churches, attempting to define the agendas for a whole country’s worth of believers – something I believe is antithetical to the entire purpose of the church from creation.
The church, at the most basic level is the group of people within which God has chosen to send his Spirit. This church is a highly personal group of interrelated individuals who seek to become more as God would have them be, and less like the world (and their own sinful ways) would have them be. They are a community at odds with the structure of power and authority, a quiet, but revolutionary counter-culture (in the purest sense.) These national churches, distracted (like the character Hyacinth
Bucket in the BBC’s Keeping Up Appearances) with presenting a facade to the press and the hypothetical alienated non-attender (insert likely, white, upper-middle class, college-educated) have missed the whole point in being the church and in the process done nothing to staunch the loss of their present members.
While this mess certainly sells newspapers it certainly is also illuminating the fundamental problem with large bureaucratic denominations: Christ-imitation doesn’t work when the faces you deal with are no longer people and God’s word is no longer the defining measure of this world. Power, consolidated in these national bodies, has done a similar corollary to the Church under Constantine… corrupted the mission of Christ. Luther tried to break the choke-hold of an authoritarian central church nearly
five hundred years ago because he saw the mission of Christ go undone, today I see petty centralized power missing the mission of Christ. I believe the collapse of these national churches will occur in my lifetime, and that gives me great hope. These denominations have a rich theological tradition that doesn’t need a national body to acknowledge or continue them, but rather need a people engaged in creating a community of God-lovers and Christ-seekers to continue what Christ and the martyrs have already
done.
Bucket and Jefferts-Schori – Same wardrobe department?
More reading: On Anglican Struggles, On ELCA Struggles
Full disclosure: Baptized Episcopalian, and a member of an ELCA congregation
It’s been a while since I’ve seen something that just blows me away, but I can say I was just amazed at this. Jeff de Boer is an armor maker, something that is uncommon in our day… but the armor he makes is even more exceptional. He crafts painstakingly detailed armor in a way that reminds me of the fine examples in the Freer & Sackler Galleries in DC.
via Make!
Enjoy the the biting satire of The Church You Know.
Underage drinking, violence, an arrest… all at a Lutheran Church. It’s a sad story – but most stories that come up when I search the word “pastor” on google news are. Sounds like this church needs prayer, remember them when you pray today.
<--Church info
In our world of hyper-sexualized media it can be hard to imagine that media execs are opposed to anything that helps them make more of a profit. Apparently, for NBC at least, a bunch of vegetables in a children’s show have been spreading the forbidden love, the love of Christ. Thanks to Get Religion.