A Sound of Sheer Silence

When I was in the process of becoming an Episcopalian, a close friend of mine--someone who was a serious Christian, a priest actually, but not a Roman Catholic--expressed very serious concerns about the project.  One of his concerns was over my perceived (correctly perceived, as it turned out) lack of institutional loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church.  In his mind, once you are on a particular team, you need to stay on that time--a somewhat ironic position for him since he himself was once a convert, but nonetheless his position.  But his other, more interesting, objection is that he viewed the Episcopal Church as the "off ramp" to Christianity.  In other words his position was not that the Episcopal Church was not a "real" expression of Christianity, but that it tended to be a way station for people who eventually stopped practicing Christianity altogether. Implicit in that formulation is the notion that what is truly important is to be a practicing Christian no m...

I mean if Buttigieg thinks evangelicals should be supporting him instead of Trump, he fundamentally does not understand the roots of Christianity. But then he is an Episcopalian, so he might not actually understand Christianity more than superficially. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 7, 2019 Episcopalianism is to Christianity what Rice Krispies are to rice. It may have once been the later, but now it's just a hollowed out puff prone to snapping, crackling, and popping. — Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 8, 2019 Right-wing political commentator and self-professed evangelical Christian Erick Erickson decided to talk shit about my faith and my religious tradition over the last few days, and as such I feel entitled to respond. One can approach this response from a number of directions.  One obvious direction, and one that I saw commonly in the Twitter response to Erickson, is to interrogate this notion of "the roots of Christianity," which the Episcop...

Since I recently said that dudes should stop talking about sex and let the ladies have their say , I'm going to end this series now.  But I think there is another level to this discussion that I wanted to end on, one that Rowan Williams touches on in his essay "The Body's Grace," and one which I haven't discussed yet.  Williams frames this question in terms of a series of novels that I haven't read, but I think the thrust of what he is getting at can be seen in a beautiful, short reflection from Richard Beck, entitled "Refuse to Blow the Candles Out." Here it is in full: I think that life is hard. I think that life is sad and painful. I think that love is rare and fragile. I think that life is full of loneliness and loss and heartbreak and that we're all desperately grateful for even the smallest scraps of human warmth, kindness and intimacy.  So if I see even the smallest flicker of love, grace or tenderness I want to protect it. I want to ...

I am about 90% finished with a post on the Hebrew Scriptures seen through the Girardian lens.  In the course of writing this post, an idea that has been percolating in my head came into focus, and idea that I call Tutu's Wager.  It's a bit of a riff on Pascal's Wager, coined by the French thinker Blaise Pascal, but in a sense it is also the opposite of Pascal's Wager.  It goes something like this. Consider Huitzlopochtli. Huitzlopochtli is the god of war in the tradition of the ancient Aztecs of Mexico.  As can be seen in the picture, the proper way to worship Huitzlopochtli (and many of the other gods of the Aztecs) is to sacrifice human beings to him by cutting out their hearts.  At least, that's what the Aztec priests believed, so let's assume that, to the extent Huitzlopochtli exists, he demands the sacrifice of human beings. Suppose for a moment that you are concerned about the question of whether Huitzlopochtli is real.  Or, rather, you are co...