Granted, some denominations have published “supplements” with more modern music, but way too many have also bent to internal denominational pressure and included a plethora of hopelessly counter-productive praise choruses.
While many political operatives are trying to inch away from Trump, his everlasting white Evangelical base- churchgoers and voters- loves him, comprising approximately 60 percent of the Republican presidential primary electorate.
I have spent my life working on the inside of organized religion, even though my love/hate relationship with most God-talkers makes me an outsider.
The experience of the sacred is not an easy thing to define. It is outside of human terms and metaphors. It lives beyond the binaries and outside of boxes. There is no scientific definition of the experience of the sacred.
Along with climate change and the move from religion to spirituality, another sign of our times is the rise of the G word and the F word alive and well in high places. I am speaking of course of Greed and Fascism.
The transition from a Medieval to an Enlightenment way of thinking does not come easily. When I was a kid in the Norwegian American Lutheran Church, a bigger-than-life portrait of Jesus praying in Gethsemane was stationed over the altar, a Sunday reminder that his all-important death, soon to come, was our salvation. Jesus loved us, this we knew because the Bible told us so. And the Bible did not lie.
The Bible is a mirror. In it, we see the structure of our psyches. We see the scaffolding of our spirituality. What makes the Bible holy is not that it is the “word of God”, but rather that so many of its passages offer such breathtakingly vivid reflections of the journeys of our souls.
If you’re a mainline Christian, you likely experienced liturgy even if you are of a less liturgical tradition than the Episcopal or Presbyterian churches. And very possibly, even if you don’t know what it is, you’ve been steeped in it.
the term ethical grace emphasizes the importance of the choices we make in our lives every day to support the goodness of life on earth. Every day, we make choices that matter.
When current events and self-perpetuating systems pin me in the extractive, enslaving, short-sighted story, there are 3 practices that help me to listen for divine guidance and to re-engage in the love story’s emerging plot.