Linkathon!
Ghostbusters and the afterlife…
When God calls you off the beaten path…
Encanto and the Benedict Option…
Will the real church please stand up?
On not throwing the baby out with the bathwater…
Worship leaders hit with pandemic burnout…
The poet who cleared the ground for the sexual revolution…
These apps reserve the right to sell your prayers…
Status of global Christianity by the numbers…
How the Capitol attacks spread Christian nationalism on the extreme right…
The gods we make vs. the God we need…
Anglicanism and the supernatural…
Orlando church offers late night Covid tests to meet workers needs…
More later…
On “Not Throwing the Baby Out With the Bathwater” by Roger Olson-I usually catch him during the week, but missed this one. thanks for posting it! The fundamentalism I came out of wasn’t as abusive as Roger’s system, but I still remember the craziness of the inconsistency about asking questions. Any questions that were almost like catechism questions (What is the destiny of the unsaved? Why is it wrong to go to movies?)) were always welcome. Anything that hinted at exploratory thinking was immediately slapped down. So, you didn’t speculate on things like the age of the earth (the Scofield Bible was as ,infallible as the King James Version), the place of women in the church, or the possibility that you could still be saved and speak in tongues, be mid-Trib vs pre-Trib, etc. We were officially not to have fellowship with such people because it would damage our faith. I found the situation to be the opposite. My friends who went off the college with inquiring minds (I was one of them) are still pretty firm in the faith. The staunch legalists often lost their faith because they couldn’t reconcile it with what they were learning in school., or they went to a very legalistic Bible college where they graduated with few marketable skills. Asking questions can actually grow one’s faith.
Rather confused by the stats of religion. I would have considered Charismatic/ Pentecostal and subcategory of Protestant with a large overlap with Evangelical. Instead, the numbers show the group far larger than the Protestant. Are they counting aberrant faiths that happen to be Pentecostal in style?
Stats I’ve seen in the past have put the Charismatic/Pentecostal wing at about 25% of the Christian population and growing exponentially, which is impressive for a movement that is only 100 years old, but I’m still confused on how the group isn’t considered part of the bigger Protestant wing.
I love reading about the church offering evening Covid tests. This church was listening to the needs in the community and then worked to fill them. What a compassionate witness.
The article on Encanto was very interesting. I usually try to turn my brain off and try to, notice I said try to, watch a movie. I found the explanation of the symbolism in the article fascinating. This was a very thought provoke read on an animated movie. I am richer for it. Also the idea that the ten commandments were blueprint for the Israelites new found freedom from slavery is very provocative and worth pondering. I have always wondered about the interaction between restriction and freedom. On the one hand it seems counterintuitive while on the other it seems very practicable.
I appreciate the Benedict Option very much given that many of its most prominent supporters are very conservative Catholics who want to return to the world only once it’s transformed by their example and ardent prayers into an agrarian theocracy (#NotAllBenedictOptioners). Some of us who are conservative might think OK, not bad, but it’s not a theocracy most Protestant conservatives would thrive under, I fear.
So letting them settle in rural communities like Clear Creek Abbey and hardscrabble West Texas (or in one prominent case, Budapest, which is exotic but hardly rural) is just fine by me.
But like that country song says, “How Can I Miss You If You Won’t Go Away?” Most prominent BenOps are talking a good game about imagining sacred spaces in our modern world but can’t seem to shake the powerful draw of still engaging in familiar ways and with it using old culture war tropes.