A Sound of Sheer Silence

1.  The Spark:   On Saturday afternoon, I got home to find this on my Twitter feed. I suppose that’s why religion in the US is such a mess right now... — Carol Howard Merritt (@CarolHoward) August 10, 2019 Prior to seeing this tweet, I had no idea who Carol Howard Merritt was.  As it turns out, she is a Presbyterian minister and author, but I didn't know that until later.  All I knew from reading this is, according to her (1) everyone who believes that one must affirm the (her terminology) "literal bodily resurrection" are fundamentalists; and (2) those same folks are responsible for what is wrong in American religion. In context, it should also be said that Rev. Howard Merritt certainly seemed to be subtweeting Ben Crosby, an Episcopalian divinity student who has taken the position online that if one doesn't or can't affirm the Nicene Creed, then one should not be ordained, or allowed to be ordained.  Crosby, and others, pushed back. In the inter...

Two stories came through the pipeline in the last couple of days that caught my attention.  The first was a piece by Ross Douthat arguing for some sort of extensive ban on pornography .  The other had to do with Shane Claiborne, one of the organizers of an anti-Trump revival in Lynchburg, Virginia , who received very strong push back due to his non-affirming stance on LGBT questions ( example here , see also Bill Lindsey here ), as well as the corresponding backlash to the backlash.  The backlash to the backlash primarily took the form of "how can you shun or criticize Claiborne and claim to be a classical liberal?," an example of which can be found here .  The link between these two stories is a discussion of classical liberalism, and so it is worthwhile talking about that for a bit. We can think about classical liberalism as having two dimensions.  The first is political--a particular area of human life will not be regulated or otherwise coerced by the stat...

As long-time readers know, I often engage with the work of Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist.  And, often, I disagree with what Douthat has to say, especially when he talks about religion (I mostly disagree with his politics takes as well, but I rarely find them worth talking about).   Sometimes I have a laugh with/at the expense of Mr. Douthat .   But this Sunday's column was the first time I really got mad reading a Douthat column.  But, the key was I wasn't sure why  I was mad--it just rubbed me the wrong way.  And, upon reading it again, while I understand what about it rubbed me the wrong way, I think Douthat is basically right.  And so, in the spirit of the column, I would like to offer a Modest Proposal of my own to go in tandem with Ross's Modest Proposal. Douthat's premise for the column is that the kinds of educated, "coastal elites" that in the main read the New York Times really should start going to the more progressive Protestan...

Bill Lindsey has a series of posts on the recent dust-up at Princeton Theological Seminary with relation to Tim Keller.  To briefly summarize, Princeton is an old and very well-respected Seminary affiliated with the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA).  PCUSA allows women to be ordained and lead congregations, and also allows LGBT folks to fully participate in the life of the church (and last year authorized same-sex weddings).  Tim Keller just stepped down as the pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, a large congregation.  Redeemer is affiliated with the rival Presbyterian Church of America (PCA), which does not allow women or LGBT people to be ordained, and is much more conservative.  Keller and Redeemer have publicly endorsed the positions of the PCA along these lines ( here's a position paper  on women's ordination from Redeemer).  Princeton initially awarded a theology prize to Keller, before later revoking it.  Hence the brou...

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...

A week or so ago, I got a message on Twitter from my Twitter friend "Egregious Philbin," asking me for my thoughts on an pair of articles from J. R. Daniel Kirk, entitled "Colonizing Biblical Interpretation" and "Oedipus Text: Canon, Creed, and Post-Colonized Interpretation."   They are both interesting articles, and I have wanted to write about them for a while, but I wanted to finish the post on the Cult of Victimhood before turning to these articles (for reasons that will become clear in a moment). I should say that I have enjoy listening to and reading Kirk, especially during his appearances on the Homebrewed Christianity  podcast.  I have also said how I often feel like I have more in common with progressive Evangelicals than I do with conservative Catholics .  Reading these posts, however, was a reminder that this is not always the case, as it immediately brought out the "high church" part of my Christian DNA.  To me, these posts show t...

1.  When two people of completely different ideological orientations and convictions come to the same conclusion on something within their shared space, it is worth taking that conclusion seriously.  Such was the case yesterday, when we saw articles form Ross Douthat (the mainstream-media endorsed voice for conservative Catholicism) and James Carroll (author of Constantine's Sword  and vocal critic of the Catholic Church from the progressive end) offer essentially the same analysis of Amoris Laetitia . The analysis goes something like this.  In the aftermath of Vatican II, Catholicism developed a kind of "two track" method of operation.  On one level there was the "official" message of Catholicism, which (particularly with regard to anything dealing with sex) held tightly to essentially the same positions that controlled prior to the Council.  On the "ground," however, many priests were covertly (or, especially in the beginning, overtly) providing ...

Richard Beck had an excellent post from Monday about a self-cannibalizing tendency with the Left.  Beck points out that the exclusion tendencies stemming from purity psychology  are not somehow limited to conservative people--liberal folks engage in the exact same purity psychology.  In particular, Beck points out that allies--people that agree with parts of a particular progressive agenda--tend to be a focus of attacks, sometimes even above and beyond those who oppose the agenda in total. It strikes me that Jesus has a parable that is relevant here. “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the marketplace; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again...