xphiles

Hearken!

OK, so I'm reading The Constitutions of the Holy Apostles  (Nicene & Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7).  After a short introduction, piling up phrases that point to how Christians are called and saved by grace through faith (OK, so that's the Lutheran in me reading it, but look at the language fer cryin' out loud!), there are a couple of opening commands/ exhortations: Hearken, Take care, Please Christ, Abstain.  These fascinate me as opening exhortations to God's people.  They are so foreign to us now, both outside the faith and within the faith.  What do they mean for us?

Post is updated after the jump and with new link to the Fathers series...

August 9, 2005: Post updated again by closing comments; it's been hit by comment spammers.  Want to leave a comment?  E-mail me!  Sorry...

If the Bible Had Been Blogged

Andrew Jones of Tall Skinny Kiwi has a great & amusing post on how the Bible might have been put together had the Holy Spirit inspired bloggers.  Check it out here. 

I think the whole darn thing would be filled with hyperlinks, trackbacks, etc.  Can you imagine the post of Genesis 1:1, with trackbacks linking you to John 1, Mark 1:1, etc.?  There'd have to be some sort of "tagging" system, though.  The intertextual references are too multi-layered to fit into simple 1-to-1 correspondences.  You'd have to be able to have them linked together in complex webs.

Maybe the "comments" sections would be for the commentators of the Church...  What would the blogrolls look like, though?

What the Heck?

This is weird.  I got a couple of seemingly-random comments on this post, and now find that I am getting all sorts of hits from Google engines (in Russia, the Netherlands, the UK, and US) for an exact string of words that is found in those comments.  I mean, like dozens of hits. 

Anybody have any idea what this is about?  I'm befuddled.

UPDATE:  Thanks [belated!] to those who commented or e-mailed with the answer; it was a solution to a web game.  Evidently, someone commented with the string on the "Brain Boost" post, thinking they were putting the question into the Brain Boost search engine.  That caused the hits to come in.  One less befuddlement in my life.

In Quest to Be More Welcoming...

That's from the headline the NYT gives to a story on Yale University's chapel severing ties with the United Church of Christ.  "In quest to be more welcoming, Yale is severing ties to a church."  Ouch.

Evidently, attendance, especially among students, has been in sharp decline at the UCC congregation that worships at the Yale chapel.  From what I can glean of the "official-speak" of various press releases, it seems that the Yale administrators feel that the UCC affiliation is not "welcoming" enough to attract students.

Now, we can deconstruct the meaning of "welcoming" all day...  I'm pretty sure that by the standards of a North American university, Jesus would in no way be labelled "welcoming."  "Welcoming," in this atmosphere, means something very different than it would in a biblical context.  But what interests me in this is that it's the UCC that is being snubbed.  The UCC.  That's the church body that recently extended a welcome to SpongeBob Squarepants, fer cryin' out loud.  A denomination that has welcome and inclusion as a central tenet of its identity.  It is a church body that undeniably presents itself as a reasonable, liberal, tolerant, sophisticated alternative to "conservative" Christianity (however one defines that).  And it gets jilted by an Ivy League university.  That's gotta hurt.

We can pursue relevance on the world's terms ("liberal" or "conservative," "high brow" or "pop") all day long.  But the spirit of the age is a fickle mistress.  Not only have the UCC's numbers declined (as are the numbers of most, if not all, mainline denominations in North America), but even the bastions of liberal tolerance are not satisfied.  (And the same is true on the opposite end of the political - social spectrum as well.)  One of the things that gives me hope for the future is seeing in the "emerging church conversations" Christians who seek to establish public identities not crafted from GOP or DNC platforms or lifted from Gap ads and Starbucks promotional materials, but in a seeking, struggling, experimental way, on the character, compassion, and truth of Jesus.

Tomb, Candy Store, or Something Else?

Andrew Jones has gotten a little smack laid down on his blog of late.  My best interpretation is that it is around his use of the term monastery.  Click, read.  (A 21st century version of "tolle, lege"?)  Said smack is in the comments (in two linked posts).  I'll not rehash it here, except to say that it raises questions of the current day's Church in its relationship to the past.  Is the past a tomb, a candy store, or something else entirely?

Sheer, Unadulterated Genius

Heh.

You will click here, read, and be amused.  It will proceed as I have forseen it.

It is your destiny.

What Cost?

[UPDATE: Welcome, Pajama Pundits readers!  Thanks for stopping by, and feel free to click around.  Many thanks to Pajama Pundits for the linkage.]

Hey, maybe I can ease myself back into blogging by stealing cartoons from Hugh! 

I love this cartoon.  It's so funny because it's so true.  One of my favorite Lutherans, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, would certainly agree. 

Bad Blogger, Bad!

Bad blogger, bad!

No posts in over a month.

I'd like to think it's not because I haven't had any blogworthy thoughts in over a month.  (No comments from the peanut gallery about whether any of my thoughts are blogworthy.)

Am working to rectify situation.  Life has been crazy.  Not bad.  Crazy.  Stressful.  Working on it, though.  Praying on it, too.

Peace, y'all!

Pic from Gavingvoid.com.  Fun marketing blog.  Humor often coarse.  Not for easily offended.