All nature was designed for revelation. At least that’s what indigenous peoples, the Israelites, our church Fathers, and the Celts believed. Jesus himself, like Moses and the prophets Elijah and John the Baptizer, strode deep into the heart of the world, fasting for a vision—revelation.
“What are a Bible Story or Stories that are especially pressing for today’s world?” Clearly there are many but I have chosen one from the Hebrew Bible and one from the Christian Bible.
If Apostle Paul were alive today I know he would be apoplectic with rage by how Sessions used his sacred text. Apostle Paul was about building a beloved community, evident in his writing in Ephesians 2: 15, 19-22.
The holiday season is a difficult time of year for many.
Too often we see the glitz and glamour that this holiday brings, and we miss its spiritual message. The underlying message in celebrating the season-Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and the winter solstice- is the full embrace of human difference and diversity.
I believe if Americans stayed more focused on the message and teachings of this holiday season, many LGBTQ youth and young adults would not have the annual angst of searching for a home for the holidays.
However, LGBTQ people like the Early Christians struggle for full acceptance in society.
As some of you are already aware, I am in the middle of a project retelling early Christian texts as poems, tentatively titled Apocryphal Monologues. Each poem pairs modern-day ethical questions with words from an ancient text, putting them into dialogue with one another. In some cases I am retelling whole texts, such as On the Origin of the World. In others, as in the poem above, I engage with a single episode or saying. Along with miscarriage, the poems so far address nuclear meltdowns, the arms race, rape, abortion, and the feminine as a legitimate expression of the divine. I don’t want the poems to be preachy; I try not to moralize. I’m more interested in asking difficult questions of the texts and demanding emotionally honest answers.
“My goal in life is to pray without ceasing”.
Bishop John Shelby Spong
In his book A New Christianity for a New World: Why Traditional Faith is Dying & How A New Faith is Being Born, Bishop Spong addresses multiple issues worthy of further consideration especially because the coming year 2017, marks the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation and Spong is rightly calling for a Reformation today.(1) I suppose it is worth mentioning that I have been doing the same as in my book A New Reformation: Creation Spirituality and the Transformation of Christianity which contains the 95 theses that I pounded at Luther’s church in Wittenberg at Pentecost season in 2006 in response to Cardinal Ratzinger making himself pope, a practice I repeated five years later at Cardinal Law’s Basilica of Maria Maggiore in Rome on a Sunday morning in protest of his cover-up for pedophile clergy in his previous assignment as archbishop of Boston.
It is time that we as a nation stop pretending and face the facts as they are. The evidence is overwhelming. Despite concentrated efforts to perfume intolerance under code …
Paul was the first, perhaps he was also the most important, but he was not the only witness to the resurrection of Jesus in the biblical narrative. To complete …
Last week, we explored the Pauline corpus of the New Testament in order to learn what Paul meant when he wrote that “God raised Jesus” to the “right hand …
“The Easter event gave birth to the Christian Movement and continues to transform it. That does not mean, however, that Easter was the resuscitation of Jesus’ deceased body …