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...
So now I'm here: married to a credo-baptist who is crowned with the fruits of the Spirit and who possesses a warm and generous heart. We attend an SBC Reformed Baptist church. I had to receive believer's baptism before I could join. And from my solid upbringing, church membership is a vital ingredient for spiritual maturity. As I started spending more time with Baptists, I started wondering why Presbyterians (of a certain sort at least) seem to continually harp on baptism -- even to the point of implying that Baptists can't fully grasp the Gospel because they don't subscribe to infant baptism. My Baptist husband and friends seem somewhat bewildered by the vehemence over paedobaptism. Michael Bull over at Bully's Blog has been invaluable at pointing out something so simple, I can't believe I overlooked it: Baptism is not the new covenant equivalent of circumcision, because the "circumcised," transformed heart is the sign of the new covenant. It a...
Update: rereading the title page . . . I read an abridged version! Should have followed Mortimer Adler's advice and read the informative bits more closely. Trying to spend less time lost in the swamp of social media, I've been trying to read more. Specifically books. Specifically in codex form . . . book books. Our library has few titles that I recognize these days. I rarely go to the library and more rarely still to the fiction because it seems so difficult and tiresome to wade through all of the best sellers from 2007. The "biography" section is similarly afflicted: if it's not about JFK, FDR, MLK, or Marilyn Monroe, it's a memoir by a celebrity. How the memoir of an actor or performer could be more interesting than their wikipedia page, I really can't imagine. For instance: Tina Fey does not strike me as a pleasant person. Therefore I avoid her company, even on the written page. Same for any Clinton. Or Barbra Streisand. Or Elizabeth Taylor. And thus...
Comments