Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
When the Sabbath was over, Mary of Magdala, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought some spices, so that they might go and anoint the body of Jesus. And very early on the first day of the week they went to the tomb, after sunrise. They were saying to one another: "Who will roll …
Continue reading ""…for they were frightened": An Easter Reflection"
That's what the President basically said in his grim speech to the newspaper editors: As he often does, the president chose to deal with gritty political issues -- what to do about the deficit, spending, taxes and entitlements such as Medicare -- by widening the lens. This election, he said, will be nothing less than …
Continue reading "Social Darwinism: The Republicans Can't Win on Evolution"
Today is Palm Sunday, when we celebrate Jesus' triumphal entry into Jerusalem, an entry which turned sour very quickly for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, then back to the supreme triumph of the Resurrection. For those who experienced it the first time, it was at least an emotional roller-coaster; our attempts to recreate the experience …
Continue reading "The Church of the Palm Crosses Becomes the Church of the Double Cross"
An excellent way for people in the Chattanooga, TN area to fill their Holy Week is with this production:
Our government wants to play both sides of the street in this issue, but is having a hard time doing so: Throughout the two-year history of the health care litigation, judges have mocked the Obama administration’s have-your-cake approach to the central question debated at the Supreme Court on Monday: whether the constitutional challenge is even …
Continue reading "The Tax Issue is the Central One for the Health Care Mandate"
My attention has recently been drawn to an item in Christianity Today on "Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Leaders." Having spent proportionately as much time in ministry work as anyone dealing with leadership issues and leadership training, I can say that the whole issue of leadership has become something of an obsession in Christian circles, …
Continue reading "Failure Requires More Than Just Being Ineffective"
Maureen Dowd expresses shock that there are Southern doves: “We are spending $10 billion a month that we can’t even pay for,” said Congressman Walter Jones, that rarest of birds, a Southern Republican dove. “The Chinese — Uncle Chang is lending us the money to pay that we are spending in Afghanistan.” On Tuesday morning, …
Continue reading "When You're Doing All of the Fighting, It Eventually Gets Old"
We've been told that this doesn't happen, but now we know better... During a Sunday morning service at Trinity Church last summer, a longtime parishioner looked around during the reading of the Gospel and counted the worshippers. By her tally, there were 49 people in the pews of the historic lower Manhattan church - a …
Continue reading ""Evangelistically Speaking" Comes to Liberal Christianity"
Visitors to Stand Firm in Faith, had they not heeded the warnings, were probably surprised to see the entirely new format yesterday evening. And it was a pleasant surprise; the changes take Stand Firm into a new dimension as a blog and in reality as a news source. As Greg Griffith explained, the changes are …
Rowan Williams' resignation/retirement as Archbishop of Canterbury has generated a great deal of comment within and without the Anglican/Episcopal world. It's not been a happy tenure of the seat of Becket and Cranmer (it ended badly for them, too, from a temporal standpoint) and everybody knows it. But life is too short to make all …
Continue reading "Rowan Williams: Anglican Fudge Doesn't Work Any More"
Positive Infinity 