Only after people have a vision of God (the love, beauty, justice, and power of his kingdom) will they be ready to intentionally seek and employ the means to experience him through obedience—an aspect of spiritual formation that occurs most effectively in smaller settings through the medium of relationship.
"When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a comedy show, then a nation finds itself at risk."
"Yes", my friend said. "I don't see why there shouldn't be books in Heaven. But you will find that your library in Heaven contains only some of the books you had on earth." "Which?", I asked. "The ones you gave away or lent." "I hope the lent ones won't still have all the borrowers' dirty thumb marks", said I. "Oh yes they will", said he. "But just as the wounds of the martyrs will have turned into beauties, so you will find that the thumb-marks have turned into beautiful illuminated capitals or exquisite marginal woodcuts."
Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others.
...recently the most common explanation atheists give for religious belief is that such belief is evolutionarily favored: that is—for reasons which some atheists guess at, while others decline to speculate—religious belief in a person increases the chance that that person will pass on his or her genes to another generation.Now, an atheist saying this immediately has a new problem, especially if he or she thinks that religious belief produces violence and intolerance—which is what many atheists, most notably Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, have shouted from the world's rooftops. Anyone who holds both these views is in an interesting position, to say the least. Do we say that if I am violent and intolerant toward others I am more likely to pass along my genes—perhaps because I kill or injure those who do not share my religious beliefs before they can reproduce? If we do say that, then the atheist who protests against violence and intolerance will have to argue that we should behave in ways that do not maximize the likelihood of passing along our genes.
But this is a bad situation for an atheist to be in...If religiously inspired violence and intolerance are evolutionarily adaptive, and the blind processes of natural selection are the only ones that determine reproductive survival in the long term, then people who argue against religion and its accompanying pathologies are certain to diminish in numbers and eventually become totally marginal—nothing more than the occasional maladaptive mutation. The selfish gene will ultimately, necessarily, win out over the altruistic one.
Alan Jacobs, Christianity Today Books & Culture
The problem was that, squatting in an area that the county wanted to convert into office space, there was a large ugly wad of metal, set into the concrete. So the county sent construction workers with heavy equipment to rip out the wad, which was then going to be destroyed.But guess what? Correct! It turns out that this was not an ugly wad. It was art! Specifically, it was Public Art, defined as ''art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.'' The money, of course, comes from the taxpayers, who are not allowed to spend this money themselves because 1) they probably wouldn't buy art, and 2) if they did, there is no way they would buy the crashed-spaceship style of art that the experts usually select for them.
Dave Barry
I was angry over what had been said about me personally and I was concerned about the seeds of dissent in the congregation. And what was I going to do about it? I was going to confront the people who were criticizing me behind my back and force them to deal with me face-to-face. And 1 would rebuild the peace of the congregation through visitation and preaching. Actually, it was routine pastoral work. He interrupted my conventional approach. “Don’t you think there might be more to your anger than righteous indignation? Don’t you think it could be a symptom of pride that you didn’t know you had? Why don’t you explore the dimensions and ramifications of your anger? And as to the unrest; what if the Spirit is preparing something new in the congregation? What if the whitecaps on the recently smooth waters are caused by the wind of the Spirit, not the whispers of critics? Isn’t it possible that you are working for a premature and bland peace when some thing deeply creative is in motion?” He named the anger as sin; he discerned the unrest as Spirit. He directed me to the essential work of dealing with my sin and responding to the Spirit. The things I had set out to do still had to be done, but they were mere footnotes to the major work that he set before me. He directed me to the obvious, but in my passion to clear myself and to have a smilingly harmonious congregation I hadn’t so much as noticed the obvious. That is why the work of spiritual direction is essential — because we need to deal with the obvious, with sin and with the Spirit, and we would rather deal with almost anything else.
In these moments when we are in conversation with another and spirit touches spirit, “deep calling to deep,” there is often a confirming sense that we are doing our best work. So we don’t need to be talked into doing this, at least most of us do not. For most pastors being a spiritual director doesn’t mean introducing a new rule or adding another item to our overextended job descriptions, but simply rearranging our per spective: seeing certain acts as eternal and not ephemeral, as essential and not accidental.
Those who read poetry to improve their minds will never improve their minds by reading poetry. For the true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end.
IT IS THE DESIRE for God which is the most fundamental appetite of all, and it is an appetite we can never eliminate. We may seek to disown it, but it will not go away. If we deny that it is there, we shall in fact only divert it to some other object or range of objects. And that will mean that we invest some creature or creatures with the full burden of our need for God, a burden which no creature can carry.
It is fatal to exegesis when this narrative sense is lost, or goes into eclipse. Every word of Scripture fits into its large narrative context in one way or another, so much so that the immediate context of a sentence is as likely to be 85 pages off in words written 300 years later as to be the previous or next paragraph. When the narrative sense is honoured and nurtured, everything connects and meanings expand, not arbitrarily but organically - narratively. We see this at work in the narrative-soaked exegesis of a preacher like John Donne whose texts always lead us "like a guide with a candle, into the vast labyrinth of Scripture, which to Donne was an infinitely bigger structure than the cathedral he was preaching in." (Northrop Frye)
from The Brand Gap by Marty Neumeier (AIGA, 2006)Depending on your Unique Buying State, you can join any number of tribes on any number of days and feel part of something bigger than yourself. You can belong to the Callaway tribe when you play golf, the VW tribe when you drive, and the Williams-Sonoma tribe when you cook a meal. Brands are the little gods of modern life, each ruling a different need, activity, mood, or situation. Yet you're in control. If your latest god falls from Olympus, you can switch to another one.
Most of the people we meet, inside and outside the church, think prayers are harmless but necessary starting pistols that shoot blanks and get things going. They suppose that the "real action", as they call it, is in the "things going" - projects and conversations, plans and performances. It is an outrage and a blasphemy when pastors adjust their practice of prayer to accommodate these inanities.
One gets an impression that because of the numerical strength of Africa's church, Africans Christians can be equal partners with their Western counterparts. But we cannot pretend that the power of America does not exist. There is a new desire to learn from one another, but how deep does the learning go? I have a hard time getting a serious answer when I ask American churches what they have learned from their African "partnerships." Perhaps instead of spending $2.5 million on a building, they scale it down to $2.3 million. But they're still constructing baptismal fonts that automatically adjust the temperature! In a world where millions of Christians have no clean water, how much has been learned here?
