We've just marked Easter -- or rather, we've just entered Easter season which culminates in Ascension Day on May 10th. Apologetics on the necessity of Christ's gruesome death and the certainty and reasonableness of His Resurrection are a regular this time of year. And so I would like to remark on the elegance and vigor of Christian apologetics. Randy Newman spoke about evangelism and apologetics to our church a little while ago and my husband speedily bought his book, "Questioning Evangelism." Newman makes the case for a more Socratic approach to evangelism rather than the traditional Grab Them by the Collar and Give Them Hell, Buy Now! sales pitch. I'm very adverse to the latter. For one thing, it's generally too wrote. For another, it would require a personality change and I think those are harder to come by than sex changes, even in this age of redefinition. One hears over and over of atheists growing up in religious households where asking Why? ...
Aimee Byrd noted (somewhere on her blog in the archives) that the Complementarian movement needs to address men using its tenets to hide domestic abuse. I came of age when the Biblical Patriarchy movement was in vogue. We did not hold with many of its dictums (especially the one about girls staying home all the freakin' time and avoiding college) but it still affected us. My dad was just fine with me and my mom wearing pants, but I often felt self-conscious about it. (Really, a stupid thing to obsess over.) I often felt that my hair was not long enough nor our family big enough. (The patriarchy movement seemed to believe that fertility was next to godliness.) When I learned about Complementarianism, it felt like fresh air. Patriarchy stressed hierarchy to the point of totally overlooking "in the image of God He created them, male and female." Reading Genesis it appears that my womanhood has something to tell us about what God is like. I felt strangely relieved when the...
The royal wedding (or sort-of sub-royal) is old news but I want to add my little 2 cents to the non-gushing side of things. Bishop Michael Curry made quite a stir with his sermon. The Americans have been raving about it. I noticed a line featured on the cover the People special wedding edition. It seems that most of the "love" is simply patriotic fervor because Curry is American. There are plenty of churches in America where similar sermons are given -- perhaps with less flair -- with little publicity. Hillsong, for example. I'm pretty sure that exact sermon gets trotted out every so often. Maybe Bieber finds it inspiring. It should be noted that Bishop Curry smooshed together all the various kinds of love into one amorphous mass. He spun the Song of Songs as puppy love; it had as much depth as a Beatles song but four times as long. It had little in common with the mighty unquenchable love that Dr. Martin Luther King spoke of. He did happen to mention Jesus. There...
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