Jim Johnson's List: Religion

• A letter signed by 15 leaders of Christian churches that calls for Congress to reconsider giving aid to Israel because of accusations of human rights violations has outraged Jewish leaders and threatened to derail longstanding efforts to build interfaith relations.

• The Christian leaders say their intention was to put the Palestinian plight and the stalled peace negotiations back in the spotlight at a time when all of the attention to Middle East policy seems to be focused on Syria, the Arab Spring and the Iranian nuclear threat.

  "We asked Congress to treat Israel like it would any other country,"
• The Christian leaders' letter acknowledged that both Israelis and Palestinians had suffered, and that both sides bore responsibility. But it called for an investigation into only Israel's activities.
• The Jewish leaders said such an approach was a "double standard."
• focused only on Israel because it is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, and because the aid flows to Israel without conditions or accountability.
• Humanitarian aid to the Palestinian Authority was suspended last year because of violations
• The need to hold Israel as accountable as other countries in the region is important,"
• The Jewish leaders were shocked not just by the content of the letter, but also by the fact that the Christian leaders had not given them any warning.

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• Historians may remember Obama as the nation’s first black president, but he’s also a religious pioneer. He’s not only changed people’s perception of who can be president, some scholars and pastors say, but he’s also expanding the definition of who can be a Christian by challenging the religious right’s domination of the national stage.

  When Obama invoked Jesus to support same-sex marriage, framed health care as a moral imperative to care for “the least of these,’’ and once urged people to read their Bible but just not literally, he was invoking another Christian tradition that once dominated American public life so much that it gave the nation its first megachurches, historians say.

  “Barack Obama has referred to his faith more times than most presidents ever have, but for many it’s the wrong kind of faith,” says Jim Wallis, head of Sojourners, an evangelical activist group based in Washington that focuses on poverty and social justice issues.

• “It is not the faith of the religious right. It’s about things that they don’t talk about. It’s about how the Bible is full of God’s clear instruction to care for the poor.”

  Some see a 'different' kind of Christian

  Obama is a progressive Christian who blends the emotional fire of the African-American church, the ecumenical outlook of contemporary Protestantism, and the activism of the Social Gospel, a late 19th-century movement whose leaders faulted American churches for focusing too much on personal salvation while ignoring the conditions that led to pervasive poverty.

  No other president has shared the hybrid faith that Obama displays, says Diana Butler Bass, a historian and author of “Christianity after Religion.”
• There was a time when Obama’s brand of Christianity would have been understood by millions of Americans, historians say.

• The Social Gospel and progressive Protestantism dominated the American religious square from the end of the 19^th century up to the 1960s. At times, the traditions blended together so seamlessly that it was hard to tell the difference.

  The Social Gospel rose out of the excesses of the Gilded Age in the 1880s, when urban poverty spread across America as immigrants crammed into filthy slums to work long hours in unsafe conditions.

• Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist pastor in a New York slum, urged the church to take “social sins” as seriously as they took individual vices. Churches began feeding the poor and fighting against other social ills.

  “The notion that religious people should be about feeding the poor and helping the homeless is a carryover of the Social Gospel,” says Charles Kammer, a religion professor at Wooster College in Ohio. The Social Gospel was adopted by many Protestant churches in the late 19th and early 20th century, says Bass, the church historian. Some of the Social Gospel churches grew popular because they provided the poor with everything from English classes to sewing instructions and basketball leagues.

  “The first American megachurches were liberal, Social Gospel urban churches,” Bass says.

  The Social Gospel, though, sparked a backlash from a group of pastors during World War I. They were called fundamentalists. They published a pamphlet listing the “fundamentals of the faith:” Biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth, Adam and Eve.
• Progressive Christians eventually lost the messaging wars to this fundamentalist subculture

• The result today is that the Protestant tradition that shapes much of Obama’s Christianity is fading from public view.

  The share of Protestant Christians in the United States has dropped below 50% of the population, according to a recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.
• White mainline Protestants make up only 15% of the nation’s population, the survey revealed. The study also found that the fastest growing "religious group" in the country is people who are not affiliated with any religion.
• Another generation of Christians, though, may bring a new version of progressive Christianity back.

• He could be seen as the last embodiment of a progressive version of Christianity that went obsolete.

  Or he could be seen as a leader who helped resurrect a dying brand of Christianity for a new generation.

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• 2 Tim 4:2 commands us to ministers to PREACH THE WORD.
• 1. Expository preaching – this is preaching through a book of the Bible verse by verse.
• 2. Textual preaching –
• Textual preaching is preaching on a section of the Bible without preaching the entire book of the Bible.
• 3. Topical preaching – this preaching uses several Scriptures of the Bible to address an issue or discuss a topic.
• 4. Narrative preaching – this style is gaining some grounds nowadays especially with the concept of storytelling being widely used in the business world today.

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• Evangelicals also typically protest that Mormons believe in salvation by good works. Some Mormons do indeed believe this, just as many Catholics and some Protestants believe they will be saved by being good Christians. Yet the Book of Mormon teaches salvation by Christ's work of grace: "There is no flesh that can dwell in the presence of God save it be through the merits, and mercy, and grace of the Holy Messiah" (2 Nephi 2:8)
• Mainstream Christians who condemn Mormons for teaching salvation by works sometimes forget that Jesus teaches the necessity of works as a fruit of true faith: "By their fruit you shall know them" (Matt. 7:16). "You are my friends if you do what I command you" (John 15:14). "If you love me, you will keep my commandments" (John 14:15).
• At the same time, evangelicals have legitimate reasons to believe that Mormon beliefs are different from those of historic Christianity. For if Mormons believe Jesus is now fully God, they do not believe he was always God. Joseph Smith wrote that just as God "was once as we are now," Jesus over time grew into being God (Abraham 3:24).
• The contrast with Christian orthodoxy is considerable: the Jesus of the historic church was always the second person of the Trinity, fully divine and fully equal to the Father, who in turn was always God.
• Another point of important theological difference is that Mormons do not believe Jesus is the same God as his Father. Christian orthodoxy says instead that Jesus and his Father are two persons in one God—they share the same divine substance. For Joseph Smith and the resulting Mormon tradition, on the other hand, the Father and Son and Holy Ghost are three divine "personages" or Gods amidst a "plurality of Gods,"
• Mormons also believe that Jesus is not different in nature from us mortals, but is one of our species. Like us, he started with divine potential and by his choices ended up as omniscient and omnipotent, just as we can.
• So Mormon doctrine is quite different from historic Christian orthodoxy on the Incarnation, the origins of Jesus' divinity, his relationship to the Father, the Trinity, monotheism, human nature, and the creation of this cosmos.
• But if we should not ignore the differences, we must also not ignore the overlap between Mormon views and mainstream Christian views. For one thing, Mormons insist they believe in Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord.
• They believe in what Luther called the third use of the law—that God's moral teachings in both Testaments help guide Christians in making moral decisions and knowing what a faithful life looks like. They believe, with the historic church, that the Ten Commandments are not simply ten suggestions.

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• American exceptionalism is the belief that America, among all nations, is unique. Other nations rise and fall, but not America. In all of the history of the world, America alone has a special destiny, one mapped out by God. Sure, there may be rough patches, but ultimately we will be Number One.
• Mormons are exceptional in their belief in American exceptionalism.
• Mormon pioneers carried many things with them in their flight in 1846 from the United States

• Before beginning the trek West, Brigham Young and the leaders of the church issued a ...

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  PROCLAMATION of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

• To all the Kings of the World; to the President of the United States of America; to the Governors of the several States; and to the Rulers and People of all Nations:

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  GREETING: KNOW YE THAT the kingdom of God has come ...

• Upon arrival in the Valley of the Great Salt Lake, Young lost no time in setting up a government in exile to step in when the world went all to hell.

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  It was called the Council of Fifty, "also known as the Living Constitution, the Kingdom of God, or its name by revelation, The Kingdom of God and His Laws with the Keys and Power thereof, and Judgment in the Hands of His Servants, Ahman Christ.
• Young said, "There is not a Territory in the Union that is looked upon with so suspicious an eye as is Utah, and yet it is the only part of the nation that cares anything about the Constitution."

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• The Rev. Mark Whitsel
• pastor, an avid guitar player, runner, cyclist, hunter, fisher and reader, grew up in Hollidaysburg in Blair County and moved to the Pittsburgh area to attend Westminster College, he said. He served at Union Presbyterian Church in Robinson Township for the last eight years.

• One of the things that attracted Whitsel to Pleasant Hills Community Presbyterian Church is that the congregation is a staple in the South Hills, he said.

   

  Whitsel looks forward to working with church leaders to set goals and “craft a vision,” he said. The main question he would like to answer is how to further reach out into the community to provide services and bring people into the church.
• The Presbyterian church requires a quorum of one-tenth of the 1,490-member congregation vote to appoint a senior pastor.

• On Oct. 21 Whitsel received an unanimous appointment.

   

  “There were 307 votes and they were all yes,”
• The Whitsel family, which includes Mark, wife Kelly and sons Silas, 3, and Oliver, 1½,
• The Whitsels have been married for five years.

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• Those who follow Jesus yet don't formally express Christian faith are said to belong to insider movements.
• The early church fathers faced external and internal challenges; they wrote the creeds to solve their own challenges, in their own contexts. So if [the] church fathers solved their own problems by finding answers in the Word of God, then the people who are working among the Muslims have to identify their own problems and even call councils to discuss the challenges and apologetic [issues] in these contexts.
• If you believe that even Muslims have received general revelation, then you have to start there.
• you come to them with good news, [to] restore their relationship with the Creator God, then you have to receive the name they have for him, Allah. If we say that the one they know as Allah is not God, we are not [speaking] against the religion of Islam, or Muhammad or Qur'an, but against the doctrine of general revelation.
• You start with their limited Christology and Christ's role in the kingdom of God, mainly his role in the Day of Judgment. Muslims start to think from Islamic Christology, but they end up with Isa [as the one] who overcame the power of death. They progressively understand him, from prophet and messenger to Savior and then to Lord. But this takes time and the Holy Spirit, as it also did for Peter.
• It is possible for Muslim-background believers to join the existing church. But the evangelical church in my country represents a mixture of two religious forms, the Coptic Church and traditional religion.
• we need a Muslim-focused church-planting strategy, because it will produce a church that uses the terms and forms from their Muslim community, not something from other religious communities.
• The content of church is from heaven, but the form of the church should be from the ground, the culture. The church should reflect Muslim culture, not Muslim theology.
• we cannot rule out syncretism at the beginning of a new believer's life. The purpose of discipleship is to separate their old beliefs from their new beliefs. So when they put their faith in Jesus, they may have at the same time Muhammad in their heart. But when they start to pray in the name of Isa for their own need, they experience joy, assurance, and peace. And when they pray in the name of Jesus and find people healed and demons cast out, they completely stop thinking about Muhammad. It is a process of the Holy Spirit.

• When they first come to believe in Isa, of course they still think [of themselves] as Muslims. What else could they think? We are not telling them they are now Christians.

   

    But when they understand the gospel more clearly, they don't want to have an Islamic religious identity. Yet they also do not want to let go of their cultural identity as Muslims, which naturally includes forms from their previous way of life and worship.
• It is the evangelist's responsibility to choose which benefit of the Cross is the answer for the spiritual needs a Muslim feels. Then gradually the Holy Spirit will explain the benefit of the Cross as it relates to their sin.

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• any classic, middle-of-the-road Christian can offer a hearty "Amen" to a great deal of Rob Bell's theology.
• I mostly stumble over his epistemology—his understanding of how we come to know what is true, and by what method we determine how to live authentic lives. As I argued in the book, this is precisely my concern about evangelical faith as a whole. The thesis in my book and in this essay is that in this respect, Rob Bell is not only an evangelical, but an evangelical's evangelical, the evangelical par excellence.

• His new book is titled What We Talk About When We Talk About God (HarperOne), and it's natural to expect epistemology—how we know what we know when we talk about God—to come into play. And it does, and it's embedded all through the book. Some examples (my italics for emphasis):

   

    When I talk about God, I'm talking about a reality known, felt, and experienced . . . . (page 62) When God is described as father or mother or judge or potter or rock or fortress . . . those writers are talking about something they've seen, something they've experienced and they are essentially saying, "God is like that." (89) So, when we talk about God, we're talking about our brushes with spirit, our awareness of the reverence humming within us, our sense of the nearness and the farness, that which we know and that which is unknown. (91)

• That understanding has changed radically in the past couple of decades, and again, Bell expresses this in ways that are representative of much of evangelical teaching today (italics added):

   

    I believe God wants us each to flourish and thrive in this world here and now as we become more and more everything we can possibly be (18). When Jesus talked about faith, he talked about fruit. . . . You tasting, seeing, encountering, and experiencing the full life of God and never being the same again . . . gaining a living, breathing awareness of the love of God and sharing it with others (148). I believe that you are already experiencing the presence of God with you in countless ways every single day (122).

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• In 1994, Amy Hollingsworth was outraged to read a scathing attack on Mister Rogers Neighborhood by a columnist who accused Fred Rogers of harming children through self-affirming psychobabble. Her response -- copied to Mr. Rogers -- led to two interviews, a lengthy correspondence and her 2005 book "The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers."

• "He had a really well-developed theology of neighbor that informed everything he did."

  The biblical command to "love your neighbor" is essential to both Christianity and Judaism.

  Rogers "believed that loving your neighbor is a central message, and that your neighbor is whoever you happen to be with at that moment, especially if they are in need. It's called 'Mister Rogers Neighorhood.' It's not called 'Mister Rogers.' His theme song was 'Won't you be my neighbor?' That was his focus," she said.

  Those who argued that he was so tolerant that he had no standards misunderstood him, she said.

  "It wasn't as if he didn't care about people's actions or motivations. He believed deeply in accepting people where they were at that moment because he felt that acceptance allowed them to grow," she said. "He never said not to grow or change. 'Tolerant' isn't the best word to describe him. The best word is 'accepting.' You accept the person with the expectation that your love and acceptance will help them grow."

• there was a German scholar named Hermann Samuel Reimarus.

  It was Reimarus, writing in the 18th century, who basically invented the modern Jesus wars, by postulating a gulf between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. The real Jesus of Nazareth, he argued, was a political revolutionary who died disappointed, and whose disciples invented a resurrection -- and with it, a religion -- to make sense of his failure.

  In Reimarus' lifetime these were dangerous ideas, and his argument was published posthumously. But within a few generations, historical-Jesus controversies inspired publicity rather than persecution.

• Part of the lure of the New Testament is the complexity of its central character -- the mix of gentleness and zeal, strident moralism and extraordinary compassion, the down-to-earth and the supernatural.

  Most "real Jesus" efforts, though, assume that these complexities are accretions, to be whittled away to reach the historical core. Thus instead of a Jesus who contains multitudes, we get Jesus the nationalist or Jesus the apocalyptic prophet or Jesus the sage or Jesus the philosopher and so on down the list.

  There's enough gospel material to make any of these portraits credible. But they also tend to be rather, well, boring, and to raise the question of how a pedestrian figure -- one zealot among many, one mystic in a Mediterranean full of them -- inspired a global faith.

• An Emphatic No

   

    Nabeel Qureshi
• First, the Qur'an was not designed to be read like a book.
• second point: The Qur'an comprises only a small part of a Muslim's worldview.
• the Islamic way of life mostly comes from traditions, called "hadith."
• Some hadith even render Quranic verses "abrogated," or repealed, depending on which imam interprets them.
• As Muslims, we did not learn Islam directly through the Qur'an. We absorbed it by being immersed among other Muslims. Christians who wish to reach their Muslim neighbors should do the same thing: be with Muslims. See the world through their eyes.

• Yes, to Witness

   

    Roy Oksnevad
• there is no better way to begin understanding a person than by reading the foundational sources that form his worldview
• realize how the Qur'an reinterprets the Bible
• better comprehend why Muslims believe the text to be miraculously dictated by the angel Gabriel to Muhammad
• discover points of connection between the Qur'an and the Bible

• Yes, to See Differences

   

    Mark Pfeiffer
• By reading the Qur'an chronologically with the aid of a commentary, Christians can uncover a rich narrative of theology and practical instruction within the context of 7th-century Arabia.
• The Qur'an poignantly reveals how minor shifts in theological thinking, relative to Christianity, can produce major differences in morality and ethics
• In the Qur'an, God does not establish perfect and absolute morality. Instead, he is often arbitrary in declaring when and to whom good behavior is to be shown.
• Love and hatred are contingent on one's relationship to the Muslim community
• The Bible teaches that morality is a part of the essence of God, that God is love (1 John 4:8). God is perfect in justice, righteousness, and holiness. God commands good and prohibits evil. These commands flow from his perfect essence.

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• There are differences between Catholics and Protestants
• in the words of Father Hans Kung, that "what unites Catholics and Protestants as Christians is incomparably more vast than what separates them."
• we find that Catholics and Protestants often mean different things even when they use the same words.
• Catholics think of grace as a supernatural power which God dispenses, primarily through the Church and its sacraments, to purify the souls of naturally sinful human beings, and render them capable of holiness.
• Protestants think of grace as an attribute of God rather than a gift from God. It is a shorthand term signifying God’s determination to love, forgive, and save His human children, however little they deserve it.
• In Catholic usage, faith means giving full and unreserved assent to doctrines that have been defined by the Church as divinely revealed truth. It is almost, if not quite, a synonym for belief. But to Protestants, faith is, in Martin Luther’s phrase, a "reckless confidence" in the goodness of God. It is more a matter of placing your trust in God than of believing certain propositions about God.

• The Catholic view of authority is clear and forthright. It goes like this: Before concluding his ministry on earth, Jesus established the Church to preserve his teachings and carry on his work among men. He gave the Apostles full

   

  power over the Church, and within the "college" of Apostles, he vested supreme authority in St. Peter. To make sure that his message could never be lost or distorted, Christ sent the Holy Spirit to protect the Church from error. This protection is so effective that the Church’s formal pronouncements on essential matters of faith and morals are considered infallible; hence they must be accepted as tantamount to the very words of God.
• The Catholic concept of authority has the great advantage of providing a clear-cut answer to the question When Christians disagree about be teaching of Christ or the will of God, who has the last word? This is a question that Protestantism has never settled.
• Many Protestants balk at the primary Catholic claim that Jesus conceived of his Church as a single, highly organized, centrally governed institution.
• Aside from the whole question of "Petrine succession," many Protestants boggle at the idea of attributing infallibility to any human being or institution.

• Finally, Protestants object strenuously to some of the conclusions that Catholics have drawn directly from their doctrine of authority.

   

  The conclusion that most irritates Protestants and most seriously bedevils all moves toward Christian unity is that there can be only one true Church.

• "Protestantism affirms that the Church must be shaken, judged, purged and remade," says Dr. Brown. "It cannot be renewed once. Its life must be a life of constant renewal, for it is ‘a church of sinners,’ a church that is constantly failing to fulfill its high calling. The attitude that must characterize the Church is the attitude of repentance."

   

  Most Protestants can pronounce a hearty amen to that sentiment. Most Catholics would be as horrified by it as they would be by an allegation that Jesus sometimes did wicked things. The reverence that a Catholic has for his Church is very similar to his reverence for Christ.
• Whereas Protestants insist on the Bible as the sole source of doctrine, Catholics believe that traditions which have been handed down in the Church for centuries may also be considered vehicles of divine revelation. They point out that the Bible itself was the fruit of oral traditions that were circulated in the Church for many years before they were written down, and that the New Testament expressly says that there were "other things" that Jesus said and did which were not included in the Gospel accounts.
• The second and even more profound difference is that Catholics arc required as a basic point of obedience to accept any particular passage of Scripture in the sense in which it has been interpreted by the "infallible" teaching authority of the Church. Protestants have no such authoritative guide to the interpretation of scriptural passages which may be obscure or confusing.
• The Reformers dodged the whole question by insisting that the Bible "interprets itself"
• In practice, this turned out to mean that every man was his own ultimate authority on the Bible.
• On one hand, it has served as the final guarantee of freedom of conscience among Protestants.
• On the other hand, it has led to the fragmentation of Protestantism into more than two hundred denominations and sects.

• This biblical account of Mary’s role in the saving events centered around the life of Christ is sufficient to establish her right to the one honor which she had foreseen: "all generations shall call me blessed."

   

  But the Catholic Church has not thought it right to stop there. On the basis of tradition, rather than Scripture, it has asserted that Mary herself was "immaculate" (sinless) from the moment of her conception in her mother’s womb; and that upon her death she did not suffer corruption of the flesh but was "assumed" body and soul into heaven. And it has not made these added beliefs about Mary a matter of choice: they have been proclaimed as infallible dogmas, which every Catholic must believe in order to be saved.
• this viewpoint, which has been most influentially expounded by Pope Paul VI, Mary is to be thought of as "the model, the image, the ideal figure of the Church." In her humble, self-effacing obedience and complete trust, she is the prototype of what all members of the Church should be like. And in her willing cooperation with the work of redemption which God accomplished in Christ, she exemplifies the Church’s mission on earth.
• Catholics pray to a multitude of officially designated saints
• Catholics also believe that each human soul is judged at the time of death, and, depending upon the presence or absence of "sanctifying grace," is consigned directly to heaven (the saints), irrevocably to hell (the damned), or temporarily to purgatory
• Christians on earth ("the Church Militant") can invoke the assistance of the saints in heaven ("the Church Triumphant") in procuring the release of souls from purgatory.
• on deposit in heaven’s "treasury of merits."
• Protestants recognize two sacraments: (1) Baptism
• (2) Holy Communion
• Catholics recognize five other sacraments: confirmation, penance, extreme unction, holy orders, and matrimony
• Catholics and Protestants have very similar ideas about baptism

• Some Protestants hold that Christians merely perform a "memorial" rite when they celebrate the Lord’s Supper. But this is a distinctly minority view in the Christian family. Most Protestants believe that the Eucharist is a "representation" of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary, and that Christ is "really present" in a mystical and incorporeal sense — every time it is celebrated.

   

  Catholics go much further. To them the sacrifice of the Mass is a "renewal," or repetition, of the sacrifice on Calvary. The consecrated bread and wine do not merely symbolize the body and blood of Christ: they are the body and blood of Christ, in a literal sense. They retain the external appearance of bread and wine, but their true substance has been transformed on the altar (hence the term "transubstantiation," which is applied to this Catholic doctrine).

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• In 2012, Harvard Divinity School historian Karen L. King unveiled a fragment of papyrus she called the Gospel of Jesus' Wife. The fragment says, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife...,'" and the rest of the sentence is cut off. Another segment says, "As for me, I dwell with her in order to…" but the speaker is not named.
• The consensus is that it is authentic, in the sense of being somewhere between the fifth and the ninth century. That's important and interesting. It likely reflects that an earlier text was copied down.
• This document is] so far removed from the first century that this rather reflects the speculations a later sect had about the earthly Jesus.
• it goes on to say, "she will be my disciple." To me, this seems most reminiscent of another text dated to the third century AD, called The Gospel of Philip.
• In the Gospel of Philip, there are intimations of Jesus being married, or at least having a partner. The Coptic term is a little ambiguous, at least regarding Mary. It's a mysterious text, but what's going on, to the best of our knowledge, in the Gospel of Philip is that Jesus and Mary are reconstituting a kind of mythic primeval androgyny. What the folks behind the Gospel of Philip are saying about Jesus is that he is the new Adam and Mary is the new Eve. And the whole point about redemption is to get male and female together once again (in my interpretation), but this time without sexual intercourse.
• From time to time, people have fun playing around with the possibility that Jesus was actually married. The argument goes something like this: In first-century Judaism, young men generally got married. Parents found a match for their son, just as in Fiddler on the Roof. We don't have clear explicit evidence that Jesus was not married, so the inference is that Jesus was married and the Gospels just never mention that. Although, when you look at texts like Matthew 19, which historical Jesus scholars ascribe high authenticity to, Jesus says, "There are eunuchs who have been made so from birth, some have been made eunuchs, and some have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven." The pretty clear inference is that Jesus himself is a eunuch. In other words, he's a single man.
• And the truth is a lot of people didn't get married. Rabbis took vows of celibacy to demonstrate their own commitment to Torah study. The Essenes were celibate. The Therapeutae in Egypt were celibate. Certain prophets, like John the Baptist, were celibate. So there is a connection between holiness and celibacy already in the first century, and Jesus fits very nicely into that.
• The thing about the wife issue is that it's near sexual ethics. There's no hotter topic in our culture right now than sexual ethics. If you can turn it around and say, "You [Christians] have been thinking for 2,000 years that Jesus was celibate, and you held that forth as an ideal. It turns out that he was married and very much interested in sex. Therefore, he didn't really care about sexual ethics they way modern-day Christians do."

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• As the lives of many Americans today fill up with sporting events, kids’ activities and answering email, studies suggest we’re squeezing in religion how and when it’s convenient — if at all.
• Recently, a survey of 804 children by the Bible Society found young people had little understanding of the true meaning of Easter, or of the Bible itself.
• Study after study tells us that Americans are less religious than we used to be
• The percentage of Americans who say they “seldom” or “never” attend religious services has risen in the past decade — to 29 percent from 25 percent a decade ago
• One-fifth of all Americans — a significant number from anyone’s perspective — claim no affiliation when asked to state their religious preference. The number of people without religious affiliation has doubled in the past two decades. This is particularly true of millennials, our young generation and the nation’s future parents.
• Meanwhile, some religious institutions are trying to evolve
• They want to pick and choose what’s convenient and to do so in way similar to going to restaurant and ordering a la carte.”
• people no longer feel compelled to build their personal schedules around attending religious services. They no longer feel “expected” to go to church on Sundays, nor compelled to go for a sense of community.

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• I’ll stay put, as long as they’ll have me. I have pragmatic reasons for staying put. If I were to move into a new ecclesiastical world, I’d have to pick my way through a new, bewildering landscape, pocked with unknown landmines.
• My main reason for staying put is theological. God is alive, and that means he surprises, and that means he frustrates the silly projections of creatures who can’t see past the horizon. Jesus will unite his church. He asked his Father to make his disciples one, and the Father won’t give his Son a stone when he asks for one loaf. But the united church won’t look like any of the products presently on the market. God is an entrepreneur who is in the business of creating new markets.
• If I were to become Catholic or Orthodox, I would have to conclude that I have never participated in a full Eucharistic service. I would have to conclude that neither I nor my pastor friends have ever stood in loco Christi in the liturgy. I would go from a church where every baptized Christian is welcome at the Eucharist to a church that excludes hundreds of millions of validly baptized Christians, and I would never again share the Lord’s Supper with Protestant friends or family members. Becoming Catholic or Orthodox would, in my estimation, make me less catholic, not more.
• As many Protestants have discovered over the past century, we also have much to learn from other traditions—from Chinese house churches, charismatic Hispanics, and African Independent churches as well as Catholics and Orthodox.
• Such humility isn’t unity, but it is already a precious gift of the one Spirit who animates the one body.

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• As I watched Dead Poets Society, Welton’s oppressive administration seemed like the Evil Empire—but Mr. Keating seemed like an equal and opposite threat. With his “Seize the day!” mantra, he seemed to shout “All things are permissible!” without the necessary caution of “But not all things are profitable!” He seemed a false Christ, granting his students a license to lust, sending them off into lives of unhinged sensualism.
• I was so preoccupied with the boys’ reckless rebellion that I missed the contrast between their sophomoric declarations of independence and their compassionate teacher’s counsel.
• In sharp contrast to the boy’s controllers, Mr. Keating models a healthy balance of freedom and responsibility.
• Looking back at authority figures who have inspired my respect, and at those who have been driven by ego and a desire to control, I’ve come to suspect that anyone who seeks to instill character in another person by force will produce an equal and opposite reaction. Those Dead Poets boys aren’t anarchists or hedonists. They’re human beings pushing back against forces that would press them into dehumanizing molds.

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• No one in the Bible has been so elaborately misrepresented. In addition to not being an ex-prostitute, Mary of Magdala was not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who anoints the feet of Jesus with ‘about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume’ and then wipes it up with her hair. Nor was she the ‘woman taken in adultery’, the one told to go and sin no more. Nor was she the wife of Jesus.
• What do the Gospels tell us about Mary of Magdala? That she was known as ‘Magdalene’, had seven demons cast out of her by Jesus, was present at the foot of the cross, discovered the empty tomb and was the first person to whom the risen Lord appeared. You’d have thought that this was enough to be going on with — but no. We will not leave the poor woman alone.