The Crossroads of Christianity and Culture

Let’s start at the beginning, literally. Creation, we and world we live it, is both an expression of the love of the Triune God and an extension of that love. Creation is and is intended to be a manifestation of the Triune nature of God: Beloved, Lover, and Love itself. Humanity, made in God’s image, is intended to be a conscious expression of and participation in that divine love. As stewards of God’s intention for creation we should be to the whole of creation, and to one another; lover, beloved, and love itself. Adam’s primal act of naming was his participation in this distinctly Trinitarian love. Name-giving re-creates the Trinitarian model within creation, allowing love to be differentiated into lover, beloved, and love itself.  Sin is the assertion of our independence from God’s love. Sin is us breaking our world into subjects and objects rather lovers and beloved. Sin is humans substituting  power  for  love  in the relationship between creatures.  ...

An undivided church. I recently sat in on several international consultations of Methodists and United Methodists. All spent some time discussing informally the upcoming Special Session of the General Conference. And those conversations reminded me of nearly 30 years of listening to conversations of, and living among, Methodists who were in some way marginalized in the larger social context.  Such marginalization can take many forms. In most of the world Methodists, like Christians in general, are a minority, often a tiny minority. This is true in India, China, Japan, and across the dominantly Muslim world. Methodists in these societies live at best in continual insecurity, and sometimes under constant attack. Even when Christianity is the dominant religion of a society Methodists are often a marginalized minority, even seen as an unfortunate sect. This is true across Europe, where small Methodist communities struggle for acceptance in societies for which Lutheranism, Catholicism, ...

I’ve been mulling the recent papal announcement that the death penalty is, like abortion, a danger to the dignity of human personhood so great as to forbid its moral justification.  The announcement should remind us that from a Catholic perspective the forbidding of abortion isn’t rooted in a scientific decision about when a human life is viable. It is a moral decision about how to protect the dignity of humanity against the encroachments of a-moral social and/or scientific reasoning. Discussions of viability merely beg the question of who defines “viable,” with disastrous consequences for any person who doesn’t meet some socially constructed definition of being truly human. Likewise insisting on the human dignity of the worst or most dangerous of humans, those sentenced to death, isn’t a question of whose life or death would make society a safer or better place. Merely seeking distinguish the lesser human, like trying to identify the “viable” human, inevitably leads to the kind of...

on castle walls And snowy summits old in story. . . .  On vacation in the mountains of Austria, and thinking of a coming week in Oxford, I had a kind of dream. Of beautiful ruins on the precipice above angry seas. Of stately queens in high castles. . .  Oh, that was just Enya, whose “The Celts” had popped up in my play list. But relevant, because her’s is the music of nostalgia par excellence. She writes Tennyson’s echos into melodies you can hum as you read the report of the Commission on the Way Forward. For despite its name, the horns of Elfland could not have more ably brought to the fore our romantic longing for a past that never was.  I won’t review the three plans of the commission - by now well known and commented on. Or various proposed alternatives. Because in one way or another all seem to me to be based less about going forward than trying to capture and repackage the echos of the past.  Does the movement started by Wesley resonate in your mind as one th...