“Contrary to conventional wisdom, Christianity has never really taken deep root in America or had any success in forming American consciousness; in its place, we have invented a kind of Orphic mystery religion of personal liberation, fecundated and sustained by a cult of Mammon.”
David Bentley Hart
Looking bad
If you look at the United States of America right now, things are not good. On almost every level, things are not good. We, the people of Jesus Christ, helped sow the wind by using the awesome power of the most powerful faction of the most powerful political party in the world to bring Donald Trump into the office of the president in the United States – a man who is manifestly cruel, ignorant, a liar, incompetent and who manifestly hates many of his fellow citizens – we brought him into the most powerful office in the land and exactly what you would expect has happened.
Source: Metaxas vs French: The Christian arguments for and against voting Trump | Ruth Jackson
A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, [Burt] Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says.“Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches—spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric—as a candidate and in office—mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.” COMMONDREAMS
Source:Leading Civil Rights…
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In March, 1964 the Anchorage Earthquake sent a Tsunami down the Pacific Coast from Alaska to hit Crescent City, California causing major damage and 10 fatalities. Several of the fatalities happened to men sitting in a bar who thought it would be a good idea to get some six packs to go– and watch the Tidal Wave come in down at the Crescent City pier.
Union or Separation? It is an important question. Many of us, maybe most of us, started with separation from God because the Western Church has preached separation for so long we didn’t even realize there was an alternative way of looking at things. But, once you take off the glasses of separation and put on the glasses of Union, Oh My! How everything changes. Dr. C. Baxter Kruger has been making this point for over 30 years. His new essay “The Mediation of Jesus Christ” is the result of a life-time of study, preaching, discussion and living life from the vantage point of union. Union of the Father, Son and Spirit, union of Jesus with all humanity, indeed, union with all creation. You may download it and send it to friends or provide them with the link to read it for themselves.
A growing body of scholarly research reveals a convoluted pattern of religious failure in which atheism and the nonreligious played little role.
Source: The Great Scandal: Christianity’s Role in the Rise of the Nazis
Kelly’s stories are tough, real, honest, and always true. Unadorned by gimmick or artifice, the pieces in this collection—all framed between the imagined voices of that most primal couple, Adam and Eve—carry us deep into the heart of a wild American world that in many ways (and most definitely for a lot of younger people) sadly no longer exists. The human settings of these stories—bars, strip clubs, dingy apartments, goldmines, ranches, logging crews, homesteads, highways—are rich with details and textures that linger long after the closing sentences. Beyond those, however, there’s always a sense of something even larger and older surrounding the often small, sometimes strange, yet always compelling events his narrators are recounting. Sometimes this larger thing is the natural world—the oceans and forests, the plants and animals—always placing the events into their proper context. At other times, it’s the human interactions themselves that somehow seem to take on this greater, at times even mythic, weight and power. Reading these pieces, we recognize how the hungers and desires, the fears and hopes, the regrets and epiphanies of his people have all somehow entered our cultural DNA, and how—like them–it’s up to each of us to come to terms with all the beauty and terror that comes with being alive.
Dave Sims
“This book is good company. And I appreciate the opportunity to associate with intriguing folks out there where I rarely venture.”
“The remarkable thing about this collection—how often it touched my heart. These stories have a soul.”
It may be that the most crucial task incumbent upon theology today is that of finally overcoming the overcoming of metaphysics. For roughly five centuries now, theological reasoning has found itself assailed by the same tedious but persistent refrain: the ringing imperative that it strip itself of philosophical tradition’s glitteringly gorgeous but cumbersome panoply of categories and concepts, so that it might again rush with youthful lightness of limb—chastened, humbled, naked, but finally free—into the embrace of the God who reveals himself only to the eyes of faith.
Remarks Made to Jean-Luc
Marion regarding
Revelation and Givenness
Hart, David Bentley Theological Territories . University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.
Remarks Made to Jean-Luc
Marion regarding
Revelation and Givenness
Hart, David Bentley (2020-04-14T23:58:59). Theological Territories . University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition. Hart, David Bentley (2020-04-14T23:58:59). Theological Territories . University of Notre Dame Press. Kindle Edition.
St. John One: One 