A Sound of Sheer Silence

1.  A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon this post on the Patheos Catholic channel .  In it, a young woman named Marina S. Olsen began what she promised is a series of posts discussing sexual sins, and she begins with masturbation.  To call the post alarmist would not do it justice--even in the heyday of the drug scares in the 80s, an anti-drug ad that adopted this tone would be seen as over-the-top.   But something struck me in reading her post--Ms. Olsen believes, with an apparently unshakable conviction, that what the Catholic Church has to say about masturbation is true.  Actually, that's not quite right--she takes as a given  that what the Church says about masturbation is true.  It is noticeable that at no point does she try to do the Dr. Greg trick, which is to justify her opposition to masturbation on the basis of ostensibly neutral or scientific grounds .  No, her thesis is that people despair about masturbation because masturbatio...

To me, the most inspiring and exciting Christian leader in the United States is the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Bishop Michael Curry.   His handling of the brouhaha over the Anglican primates meeting strikes me as not only politically masterful but also spiritually uplifting--standing firm on a set of core values, but also refusing to be provoked into recrimination and tit-for-tat.  And while it is difficult to tell exactly what the outcome will be with regard to the broader Anglican world, or even what is actually going on at some of these meetings , it seems to this outsider that the "joyous resistance in place" strategy is paying dividends. In the interview above, Curry talks about the idea of the "Jesus Movement" as a core concept in his approach.  I've heard him mention this before, and he fleshes the idea out a bit in this interview.  Bishop Curry points out that the earliest followers of Jesus were people who were impacted and transform...