A Sound of Sheer Silence

This Sunday, the Washington National Cathedral, which is technically the cathedral of the Diocese of Washington of the Episcopal Church, invited Max Lucado to preach.  Lucado is an evangelical author and speaker, known (at least in my sense of things) as one of those guys who writes those novels that fill up the massive shelf space in the "Christian Living" section of Barnes & Noble.  But, he's written other stuff, too.  And you will not, I suspect, be particularly surprised to learned that he is against gay marriage and gay relationships.  In reading through the quotes attributed to him, they seem to be pretty standard anti-gay conservative talking points--the Bible says no, if we let gays get married bestiality is next, etc., etc., etc.  So, it's bad, but it is bad in the usual way.  He's One of Those. I want to talk about this, and why I think the decision of the Washington National Cathedral to invite him to preach is incomprehensibly stupid.  ...

For the first time in almost 20 years, I preached in a church yesterday.  And, through the magic of the Internet, it is archived for all time.  If you are curious, here it is.

I'm going to cross my streams a bit here, incorporating some stuff from my other blog that reviews and discusses tabletop role playing games , my hobbyist passion.  More specifically, I want to talk about Glorantha, one of the most interesting and compelling fantasy worlds that I have encountered.  Glorantha was the creation of Greg Stafford (1948-2018), though Stafford preferred to say that he "discovered" Glorantha.  The best way to get a handle on Glorantha is to compare it with Tolkien's Middle Earth.  Tolkien's world is marked by the fact that Tolkien was a linguistics scholar, a product of upper-class English education, and a devout Roman Catholic.  By contrast, Stafford's world is marked by the fact that he was a mythology scholar, a product of the 1960s and 1970s Bay Area American counter-culture, and a practitioner of various Native American religious practices (he died while in a sweat lodge, to put perhaps too fine a point on it).  Glorantha is a...

μόνος, or "monos," means "single" or "only."  θεός, or "theos," means god, originally in the sense of entities like Zeus or Athena.  Together, it is pretty straight-forward--monotheism is a assertion that there is "a single god."  Fair enough. But, within this framework, there are actually a number of permutations.  Rather than spell them all out in the beginning, I'll cut to the case--I believe in and interpret monotheism in the maximum possible way.  I believe there is one and only one divine, transcendent principle, period.  And that singular divine principle, as Aquinas would say, "everyone calls God."  Now, I understand that singular divine principle to be compatible with the assertion that the Son of God came to earth and lived among us, but for the purposes of this reflection that thorny issue is not really relevant, so let's set it to the side. So, only one divine, transcendent principle.  This means, by defini...

All four of my grandparents have passed on.  My father's father died when Dad was in college, long before my mother (and, thus, I) came on the scene.  Dad's mother died when I was two, so I don't really remember her.  But Mom's parents I remember very clearly.  Grandpa died in October of 1991, and Grandma passed away in August of 2001. There are a handful of things that I remember from those funerals.  For Grandpa's, I remember the torrential rains in the 24 hours beforehand, flooding the streets and requiring the police in the small town where they lived to take us to the church in the "paddywagon."  For Grandma's, I remember that the pastor of the parish in which she had been a member for 50 years couldn't be bothered to come to the wake.  But what I remember maybe the most clearly was one of the hymns, sung at both of those services. It was "On Eagle's Wings," by Fr. Michael Joncas.  This song came to mind because President-elect J...

Political theory is one of those disciplines that takes on a very different valence depending on what is going on in our broader social context.  When I was first introduced to political theory in college, in the halcyon late 90s, it felt a little bit frivolous.  Interesting, at least for me, to be sure, but the idea of debating the foundational principles of different forms of government felt like a truly intellectual exercise in a world where it certainly looked like our form of government was on its way to being universal.  Now, in a time when our system feels like it is cracking and in crisis, political theory feels anything but frivolous. Crisis is the origin point of the English tradition of "liberal" political theory that became foundational to the American project, more specifically the English Civil War.  The English Civil War was between an explicitly theocratic insurgency opposed by an, while not exactly "tolerant" at least more broad-minded, establishmen...

Christianity asserts that God is love, and that this assertion reflects a first principle for understanding everything.  In order to make sense of this sentence, we have to have an understanding of what we mean when we say "love," (we also need an understanding of what we mean when we say "God," but let's start with "love").  Here, I would assert that love is fundamentally an action.  Yes, it is associated with feelings or sentiments, but those feelings and sentiments are not really the heart of this concept, I would say.  Love requires one to do something with regard to the one that is loved.  Thus, God is doing something.  But, what is God doing?  Let's hold that question for a moment. The most famous of the parables of the Gospels is probably the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).  Someone (in the NRSV translation I use, "a lawyer") asks Jesus "what must I do to inherit eternal life?"  Jesus directs the lawyer to ...