January 2011
51 posts
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December 2010
48 posts
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Yet the gospel according to John is precisely this: that God has done the...
– Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
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To be Jesus’ disciple means to allow one’s own identity to be...
– Richard Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament
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The road to a moral judgment is by way of the imagination.
– Amos Wilder
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The three fundamental theological motifs of Paul:
1) How do our actions manifest the presence of a new creation in a sin-dominated world?
2) How do our actions correspond to the self-sacrificial love of the cross?
3) How do our actions serve the good of the community?
[The Moral Vision of the New Testament]
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Taking the Christ Out of Christmas →
“At the Christmas dinner table, my brother and I were fighting over a pumpkin pie that’s not going to make much difference in the life of his church, much less in the lives of the people staying at a homeless shelter. We were really fighting out of hypocrisy: I resent people who aren’t fraught with guilt over not giving enough to the poor. My brother is uncomfortable with his...
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Theology is for Paul never merely a speculative exercise; it is always a tool...
– Richard B. Hays
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The task of hermeneutical appropriation requires an integrative act of the imagination. This is always so, even for those who would like to deny it: with fear and trembling we must work out a life of faithfulness to God through responsive and creative reappropriation of the New Testament in a world far removed from the world of the original writers and readers. Thus, whenever we appeal to the...
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Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the...
– Phil. 2:5-7
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Religion Nerd Alert
I got The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics by Richard B. Hays, a New Testament scholar at Duke, for Christmas. My parents know me far too well.
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Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to thee, O Israel.
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“Because if this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we’ve got to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition, and then admit that we don’t want to do it.” - Stephen Colbert
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Like.
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Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
– Hebrews 11:1
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Of any economic system we must ask: Does it enhance human dignity? Does it...
– Jonathan Sacks, Dignity of Difference
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Jesus and John both knew they were going to be executed pretty soon. Neither was...
– Dean Wells, It’s Working.
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We all know the cynic is the failed romantic. You don’t hate if you haven’t...
– Deans Wells, It’s Working. Sermon preached 12/12/10.
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The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad;
the desert shall rejoice and...
– Isaiah 35:1-10 (English Standard Version)
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Truth hurts.
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Dutch Panel Found 2,000 Church Abuse Claims (NYT) →
Asked in March on TV about the hundreds of complaints already surfacing then, one of its most senior figures, Cardinal Adrianus Simonis, shocked the nation by replying not in Dutch but in German.
“Wir haben es nicht gewusst” — we knew nothing — he said, using a phrase associated with Nazis excuses after the Second World War - a parallel that has reverberated around the Netherlands.
“A...
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My Jesus vs. The Bible?
There’s an interesting discussion going on over here on Ask Metafilter that I’ve been trying to finish reading for a few hours now. I have to stop every few comments though because I’m getting really frustrated, but I don’t feel that comfortable inserting myself into the debate.
My main problem with the question and with most of the answers is that I really don’t...
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At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I...
– J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King.
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fosterhood:
I’m in complete shock. Court was today and everything went differently then I was told… the plan is for Jacket to go home in the middle of January.
I’ve been reading this blog for a while now. I really hope everything works out for Rebecca and Jacket.
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Seminal Moment in Obama's Presidency →
What we saw and what I think we’ll see borne out by subsequent events is Obama revealing in a very public way the choice he has made between the two political personas he has simultaneously inhabited throughout his candidacy and his presidency. He has tried to be both pragmatist and progressive savior. And even when he stopped trying to be the savior after he was elected, he was at a...
I was afraid this was going to be a lot more awkward than it actually was. It was kind of strange that the whole audience, which seems to be primarily white, laughed as hard as they did, however.
ethosophical:
I know, it’s a Leno video, I didn’t want to watch it either. But it’s Louis CK doing more material on white privilege, so there’s all kinds of embedded brilliance there.
“Every year,...
Tumblr Staff: Downtime →
staff:
Yesterday afternoon, during planned maintenance that was not intended to interrupt service, an issue arose that took down a critical database cluster. This brought down our entire network while our engineers worked feverishly to restore these databases and bring your blogs back online.
While you…
Nitpick: Overuse of adverbs. Although I’m just happy to have my blog back. :)
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At Once Good and Imperfect: Cornel West, Brother... →
brlouis:
Cornel West, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (83)
We operate on different tracks at the same time. New experiences energize us. New possibilities excite us. Fresh romance warms our hearts, thrills our imagination, animates our dreams. These are the positive blessings of a life…
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If I have a basic political conviction, it is that people matter. Politics names...
– Stanley Hauerwas, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary.
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This book has argued, in relation to scripture and Augustine, that the church,...
– Luke Bretherton, Christianity and Contemporary Politics: The Conditions and Possibilities of Faithful Witness.
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In Jesus, time has been redeemed for the practices of peace. Its presence...
– Stanley Hauerwas & Jean Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: The Prophetic Witness of Weakness.
This truly is the vision of God: never to be satisfied in the desire to see him.
– Gregory of Nyssa
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