My favorite line from “Must-See Sermons:”  “… an edge in a tight religious marketplace.”

Jesus’ use of parables - it’s all about the shtick.

If you’re writing a thesis or dissertation on a Mac, Bookends (reference management) and Mellel (word processor) are two programs that might save you some time.  This is the best deal on the two I’ve seen - well worth the $50.

For as we believe in the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, so are we also baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; first comes the confession, introducing us to salvation, and baptism follows, setting the seal upon our assent.

Basil, On the Holy Spirit, 7.28

What do people mean when they say, “I am not afraid of God because I know He is good?”  Have they never even been to a dentist?

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

Earlier this summer I met up with a friend I hadn’t seen in several years. All I could think about during every minute of the lunch was the church we both (briefly) attended a few years back - this despite the fact that we’ve known each other since middle school.  Mostly out of self-preservation, I stopped thinking about the church when I returned to seminary a few years ago.  But since that lunch, the church has rarely been out of my mind.

[It’s not all that germane yet, but the church in question imploded in a most spectacular fashion – stemming from the pastor’s “misconduct.”  Twenty years of affairs with a ½ dozen or so women from the church (his sister-in-law, a mother and daughter, etc.) - all of whom he manipulated during counseling sessions, which in Texas is a felony (sexual assault) and landed him in prison for ~ 10 years.]

One of the things I realized was how one spectacularly bad event can re-narrate a relationship.  No longer did I think of her as a childhood friend, but a member of “the church.”  Ten years of history, recast by events with which she and I were only tangentially connected.

Since that lunch I’ve been consumed by thoughts about the church – mostly its pastor – and how far beyond re-narrating a relationship, it managed to re-narrate me – to recast my personality, fears and desires, all of which is the result of sin – some my own, and some of others.  Sorting out the two is something I’m only now beginning to do.

O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.
- W.H. Auden

Read the entire poem.

Have you ever noticed that folks with behaviors and attitudes that cause most of the world to describe them as “jerks,” are, within certain strands of evangelicalism, the same folks that self-identify as “prophets?”

As if someone who speaks for God, and on whom the Spirit especially rests, would be so devoid of His fruit.

From Gregory of Nazianzus:

Above all, be purified and you shall be pure; for God rejoices in nothing so much as the correction and salvation of human beings, which is the purpose of every doctrine and every mystery.  In this way you will become “like lights to the world.”
Oration 39

I consider the Trinity the only true devotion and saving doctrine.
Oration 43

From Hall’s Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction

The white WIFE is not a caricature; she is fully clothed in the one image, rather royally so, and her hands are full size in the other.  By contrast, the children in two of the images are minature, the size of a hand or a scrub brush, and in the other they are oversize, as if perhaps to suggest their strength for the task at hand.  The caricatured imaging suggests that they are essentially servicable, essentially to be of use.  That two African American children could be more than merely figuratively adopted by the couple on the postcard is beyond the realm of possibility.  The narrative humor posed regarding two African American children and their adoption into a white, middle-class home presumably adds to the appeal of the Gold Dust advertisements.