Rebuilding petered out during the middle of the 16th century, The outsides of churches were frozen in time. For the next 300 years the characteristic church in the Cornish (and indeed in the English) landscape was one of the 15th or early 16th century, usually with a tower and aisles. What the builders of the period achieved became what people understood churches to be, an understanding that is still with us.
By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.Generous Justice, p68
As I read and re-read all the non-Christian or anti-Christian accounts of the faith, from Huxley to Bradlaugh, a slow and awful impression grew gradually but graphically upon my mind -- the impression that Christianity must be a most extraordinary thing. For not only (as I understood) had Christianity the most flaming vices, but it had apparently a mystical talent for combining vices which seemed inconsistent with each other. It was attacked on all sides and for all contradictory reasons. No sooner had one rationalist demonstrated that it was too far to the east than another demonstrated with equal clearness that it was much too far to the west. No sooner had my indignation died down at its angular and aggressive squareness than I was called up again to notice and condemn its enervating and sensual roundness.
A sanctified and upright Christian says: My wife, my children, my art, my wisdom, my money and wealth, help and avail me nothing in heaven; yet I cast them not away nor reject them when God bestows such benefits upon me, but part and separate the substance from the vanity and foolery which cleave thereunto. Gold is and remains gold as well when a strumpet carries it about her, as when `tis with an honest, good, and godly woman. The body of a strumpet is even as well God’s creature, as the body of an honest matron. In this manner ought we to part and separate vanity and folly from the thing and substance, or from the creature given and God who created it.
[Job] is not at all satisfied with halfway measures for the needy people in his community. He is not content to give them small, perfunctory gifts in the assumption that their misery and weakness are a permanent condition.
...national surveys, which show that evangelical Christians, including persons who identify themselves as supporters of the Religious Right, are substantially more favourable towards Israel, and somewhat more favourable towards Jews in general, than are liberal Christians or the irreligious - despite the fact that evangelicals continue to support missions to convert Jews to Christianity! Moreover a new study has demonstrated that the only significant form of religious prejudice in America is "Anti-Fundamentalism" and is concentrated among highly educated people without a religious affiliation (Bolce & DeMaio, 1999).
Millions of grade-school kids just like Jerry have become hooked on gambling. They often begin gambling between the ages of 10 and 13. Four out of five adolescents have gambled in the past year, according to the Annenberg Risk Survey of Youth.
A federal commission estimated that 7.9 million adolescents in the United States are problem gamblers — that's 113 NFL stadiums filled to capacity. Clearly, gambling is not innocent entertainment for children; it's a gateway to addiction.
Unfortunately, the problem doesn't stop at gambling. Recent research on seventh- to 12th-graders in Oregon indicates that students who gamble are two to three times more likely to consume alcohol, take drugs, have sex or become violent. Other research shows that suicide attempts among pathological gamblers are higher than for all other addictions.Focus
...We know nothing any more of choirs of heavenly hosts, but we know about Auschwitz …. Perhaps evil is all that now keeps warm the space where God used to be...
...original sin is not the legacy of our first parents but of our parents, who in turn inherited it from their own. The past is what we are made of. Throngs of ghostly ancestors lurk within our most casual gestures, preprogramming our desires and flicking our actions mischievously awry...
Hillenbrand suffers from debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome, and remains largely confined to her home. On the irony of writing about physical paragons while being so incapacitated herself, she says, "I'm looking for a way out of here. I can't have it physically, so I'm going to have it intellectually. It was a beautiful thing to ride Seabiscuit in my imagination. And it's just fantastic to be there alongside Louie as he's breaking the NCAA mile record. People at these vigorous moments in their lives - it's my way of living vicariously"Washington Post via WP
"Fashionable" opinion "knows" that traditional believers, and especially those who conceive of God as an active, all-seeing being who actually hears prayers, are stupid, crazy, ignorant and dangerous. But competent social scientists know that these are lies, entirely equivalent to fantasies concerning Jewish conspiracies or orgies in Catholic convents. Nor are these beliefs about evangelicals to be excused on grounds of "ignorance". I have too often acquainted reporters with the facts, only to find no trace of them in the final article or film segment. Once again, let it be noted that htere is an immense body of research refuting these efforts to denigrate religious people. It even turns out that religious people are rather superior in terms of their mental and physical health.
As for Southerners as ignorant fundamentalists, that brings me to the worst current offenders of norms of civility: secularists, both churched and unchurched.
Recently the local media expressed approval when the chief of police of Seattle prohibited his officers from wearing uniforms to take part in March for Jesus. The media were equally agreeable when, the next day, the chief wore his uniform to march in the LGBT Parade...
[Stark goes on to give several other similar examples of this kind of dichotomy]
...The clear standard used by most of the media is that moral engagement is wonderful so long as it is entirely secular. As for religious morality, or indeed any deeply felt religious expression, nothing could be more misguided or even dangerous.
The end of this story will never be known; the Nazis destroyed the entire world. East and West, from the most fully assimilated Jews to the most Orthodox, gone. Ironically, after nearly two thousand years of conflict with their Christian neighbours, when the Holocaust came, it wore a pagan face and spoke the language of race and blut, not faith.
...as Richard Fletcher put it, "Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch". Indeed, it should be noted that when the Maimonides family and other Jews were required to convert or leave Moorish Spain, many Jews migrated to the Christian areas of northern Spain.
I'm not attempting to defend mean-spirited, polemical debate. I'm just saying that it's old news. The debates are still important, but what is even more important is how social media has changed the way those debates take place among everyday Christians.
Throughout the history of public theological debate, there was one constant—those debates only took place between a few select people—Moses, Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and so on—who gained respect through a lifetime of scholarship.
But the invention of social media, like blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, created a radical departure in communication. In pre-2004 Christianity (that is, Christianity before Facebook was invented), only a small group of Christian leaders and teachers had access to the printing press—but today everyone has WordPress. In pre-2004 Christianity it was difficult to become a published author, but today everyone is surrounded by dozens of "Publish" buttons.
Every time we log into Facebook it asks us, "What's on your mind?" Twitter wants to know, "What's happening?" When controversies large and small erupt, there are devices in every direction begging us to not just take a side, but to declare our position on the largest publishing platform ever constructed by humanity.
What few of us realize is that when we press those "Publish," "Post," "Comment," and "Send" buttons, we are making the shift away from merely "believing" truth and stepping into the arena of publishing that belief. In doing so we are effectively assuming a position of leadership and teaching that prior to 2004 was not available to us.
....
We convince ourselves that by answering the questions social media asks us we are standing for truth alongside the great leaders of the church, but slowly and subtly as we respond to the prompts of our phones rather than our Bibles we begin to worship the false gods of immediacy, distraction, and celebrity in the Temple of Lord Zuckerberg. If you don't think the value system of technology affects you, ask yourself, If it was 2003 and some author wrote some book questioning some doctrine would I have felt compelled to publish my thoughts?The result is that a million heresy charges isn't cool any more. You know what's cool? A billion heresy charges.
It strikes me as significant that, aside from events in Spain, Jewish massacres during the Black Death were limited to the area along the Rhine River. In part this reflected the terrible grip of tradition - where else in Europe did families identify themselves as Jew-roasters? But it also reflected the prevailing weakness of both Church and State authority in this region....'the most politically fractured area' of Germany...
...taking him to 'dire Devon through comfortless Cornwall'. This is one of the earliest clear references to Cornwall as a region.
I think it is true without question that the churches and religious culture in general have been deformed by a fear of science, and especially by deference toward bad science. They have more or less accepted the notion that the more people know, the less inclined they will be toward belief — a central assumption of atheism. With this comes the idea that whatever is most toxic from a religious point of view must therefore epitomize science. And all sorts of nonsense goes unchallenged.
Christianity has abandoned its intellectual traditions, ceding that ground to anybody in a white coat. Where it has tried to muster courage, it has too often tended to become irrational and shrill. Meanwhile, a great age in true science, an absolute catalog of wonders, passes by unnoticed.
Because several attempts to condemn the church for not doing more to save Jews during the Holocaust have so misrepresented the position of the medieval church, it seems worthwhile to quote the most repsected of all Holocaust historians, Steven J Katz on this matter. Calling "Thou Shalt Not Annhiliate the Jews" the "Eleventh Christian Commandment", Katz wrote:
Though Christendom possessed the power, over the course of nearly 1500 years, to destroy that segement of the Jewish people it dominated, it chose not to do so...because the physical extirpation of Jewry was never, at any time, the official policy of any church or of any Christian state. Rather...Christian dogmatics entailed prtoecting Jews and Judaism from extinction...with the quasi-exception of Pope Leo VII (936-939), no pope pemitted the use of force in attempts to convert Jews, whereas Pope John XVIII (1004-1009) openly defended Jews against hostile Christian forces...
