An excellent essay by Craig Detweiler.
Category: Spirituality
A group headed by Francis Collins announces today the launch of the BioLogos Foundation, an effort to improve dialogue between Christian faith and the natural sciences. Collins provides some additional background on a new blog, “Science and the Sacred,” associated with the project. This is exciting. I hope and pray that it represents a new, constructive phase in the maturation of evangelical perspectives on the natural sciences.
This is the first post in what perhaps will become a series on comparisons between the Catholic and Protestant traditions. Perhaps I’ll add some thoughts on the Easter Orthodox tradition as well. The purpose here is reflective rather than polemical.
For this post, I offer a quote from Thomas Howard’s book On Being Catholic. Tom was my freshman English literature professor in college. He converted to Catholicism during my sophomore or junior year and had to leave our school because of its evangelical-Reformed confessional posture. What a shame — he was a brilliant and warm teacher. So here he is on the nature of the worship service:
But we were speaking of the obvious differences between Protestant worship services and the Mass, the most immediately obvious one, to a casual glance, being the difference between a meeting, on the one hand, organized around the idea of people listening to a lecture and, on the other, an enactment. And enactment, of course, takes ritual and ceremonial form — a principle we see when we mortals come up to the great moments of human existence, namely, birth, marriage, and death, and attempt to ‘enter into’ the mysteries at stake in these events. We do not settle for speaking to each other about these things. In some profound sense that belongs to our humanity itself, we know that we must ‘enter into’ the significance of these events, and this entering into, inevitably, takes ritual and ceremonial form.
Enactment and entering into events that transcend language. Does that stir a longing in your soul?
I recently discovered the Trinity Forum, an outstanding resource on faith and culture from a Reformed perspective. I’m looking forward to their new initiative on faith and science, funded by the Templeton Foundation. A forum that includes Francis Collins and Dallas Willard as well as Trinity Forum President Luder Whitlock is bound to be interesting and hopefully productive.
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Reasons for Belief
A wonderful article by former skeptic A.N. Wilson (HT: Andy Crouch). His summation:
Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.
The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.
J. S. Bach believed the story, and set it to music. Most of the greatest writers and thinkers of the past 1,500 years have believed it.
But an even stronger argument is the way that Christian faith transforms individual lives – the lives of the men and women with whom you mingle on a daily basis, the man, woman or child next to you in church tomorrow morning.
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Conspire Magazine
This looks excellent.
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He is Risen!
He is risen indeed!
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Good Friday Song
One of the songs we’ll play tonight.
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The Greatest of these is Love
At my home church, the pastors have been preaching through 1 Corinthians 13, the “love chapter.” What a great series, on one of the most profound texts in all of literature. The first three sermons in the series are here, here, and here.
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Letting Go
Though we Protestants talk about justification by faith (versus by works), we often act as if the key to the spiritual life is adding all the active virtues, doing great things for God, sharing the gospel with others, and the like. [Medieval mystic Meister] Eckhart said, no, it’s a matter of subtraction. How much can you let go of? It’s not a matter of anxiously having to prove yourself to your teachers, to your parents, or to God so as to finally make yourself acceptable. It’s a matter of letting go of all those compulsive needs for approval and recognizing htat only after you abandon those compulsions will you be able to accpet God’s utterly free grace that comes in the gospel, in Jesus.
— Belden Lane, commenting on the spirituality of the Desert Fathers.