February 10th, 2011 by JEL
There’s a lot going on in the kindness world these days. USA Today is halfway through their Kindness Challenge, and I’m pretty sure next week is Random Acts of Kindness Week. I’m not sure exactly what the latter entails, but I’ll look into it.
Comedian Steve Harvey, one of the participants in the Kindness Challenge, has a foundation whose goal is to “share, teach and demonstrate the principles of manhood to young men, enabling them to achieve their dreams and become productive men who are balanced emotionally, politically and economically.” In 2011, he wants to expand the mentoring weekend program from LA and Dallas to New Orleans, Chicago, and New York.
When asked what advice he could give to other Challenge participants, Harvey answered:
“It’s great to have goals, of course, but there’s a saying, ‘Inch by inch, anything’s a cinch.’ Take one notch at a time. Then it’s not so daunting. You end up with a consistent feeling of accomplishment. So if your goal is to want to help 100 boys, help one first. Learn the process. Set the goal for that. Then help 5 boys. Then 20. And so forth.”
Tags: Kindness Challenge, Steve Harvey, USA Today
Posted in Acts of Kindness (AOK), Words of Christ | No Comments »
February 8th, 2011 by JEL
I rarely re-read books, but last summer I pulled Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle off the shelf and was blown away (again) by the story, the writing, and the expression of eyes-wide-open wisdom. I’ve always been a fan, which is why this article jumped out of the stream of bits and bytes and slapped me in the face this morning. It’s called “15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has or Will.”
I especially like #4 which comes from his novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. It’s part of a speech a character plans to give at the baptism of his neighbors’ twins:
“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
Tags: Cat's Cradle, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, kindness, Kurt Vonnegut
Posted in Words of Christ | No Comments »
February 7th, 2011 by JEL
Brian McLaren was one of the first people who reviewed our book. I have always found him a voice of logic and reason in a spiritual world that is often lacking in those areas. This piece talks about his belief that Christians are in denial over the ongoing change of their faith. While he points out numerous areas where the Church has changed over the centuries, he still finds many clinging to the Old Testament and traditions mindlessly passed down through the generations.
“The call to be a Christian and a follower of God and of Jesus, that call is a call to the future and not a call to the past. My Christian identity is more about joining God in the healing, restoration and development and evolution of the world moving toward a brighter, richer and deeper future. Whereas the identity of joining the Christianity apart from an evolutionary understanding is joining the ranks and we’re holding the lines of something that is 2,000 years old.”
Tags: Brian McLaren, changing Christianity, evolutionary christianity
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February 4th, 2011 by JEL
Darwin’s work on evolution has been around for about 160 years, but religious denial of the theory is a fairly recent–and American–development. As is our slippage in science proficiency. I found this piece on the subject to be a bit scattered, but still with some interesting tidbits.
For instance, maybe the fact that more Europeans believe in evolution because they’re not as religious as Americans. Well, according to one study, no.
“Many studies have found Americans are not more religious in practice than people in other nations. We just lie to pollsters as to what we’re doing on Sundays. Philip Brenner at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research did a paper looking at ‘500 studies over four decades, involving nearly a million respondents.’
The findings were summed up by Slate’s Shankar Vedantam, “Brenner found that the United States and Canada were outliers — not in religious attendance, but in overreporting religious attendance. Americans attended services about as often as Italians and Slovenians and slightly more than Brits and Germans.”
So really we attend church as much as other countries – even European countries. Americans, and apparently Canadians, just lie about it in astonishingly un-Christ-like numbers.”
Tags: Charles Darwin, Christianity, evolution, Philip Brenner, Tina Dupuy
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February 1st, 2011 by JEL
I post the following discussion topic from the Wall Street Journal’s Religion & Ethics Community Group for a number of reasons:
- I’m somewhat bewildered by the group’s very existence on a business publication’s website.
- It’s an interesting topic that has challenged thinkers for centuries.
- The actual discussion is surprisingly civil.
- There is obviously no editorial supervision in the WSJ Community.
Here’s the discussion kick-off:
How does Christianity believe in free will?
If good is all knowing.
If good is all powerful.
If good creates and has a plan for every life.
How can there be any free will at all?.
Tags: Christianity, free will, wall street journal
Posted in In The News | No Comments »
January 31st, 2011 by JEL
Nick Spencer wrote an interesting, provocative piece in The Guardian today called, “Christianity: A Faith for the Simple.” He cites some interesting statistics that show, among a pool of elite scientists, more are likely to be atheists than in the general population.
Does this mean that smart people don’t believe in God, but dumb people do? Some might make that leap, but Spencer states it might be wiser to keep your feet planted. Christianity, for one, was always intended as a faith for the simple:
“Odd as it may be to admit, there is some reason within the Christian tradition to think that Christian believers should, on average, be less intelligent, or at least less well-educated, than their opponents. Before atheists get too exited by this, it isn’t an admission that Christians are naturally stupid, though no doubt some will choose to read it that way.
Rather it is the recognition that there is a long-standing theme within Christian thought that sees the Christian message as having a particular appeal to the underclass, not only those socially and politically alienated, but also those the intellectually and educationally excluded.
Christ often remarked with particular relish, and disappointment, on the inability of the educated elite of his time to get what he was about.”
It’s a thought-provoking read; check it out.
Tags: Christianity, Guardian UK, Nick Spencer
Posted in In The News, Words of Christ | No Comments »
January 26th, 2011 by JEL
In Luke 6:37, Jesus makes it pretty clear that we are not to judge one another (lest we be judged ourselves). As such, He would probably not look favorably upon this list of the 50 Most Loathsome Americans.
Or would He?
Because the author, Ian Murphy, reserving the top spot for You (and me and all of us), is clearly willing to have ourselves be judged:
“Your brain’s been cobbled together over millions of years of blind evolution and it shows. You’re clumsy, stupid, weak and motivated by the basest of urges. Your MO is both grotesquely selfish and unquestionably deferential to questionable authority. You’re not in control of your life. You wear your ignorance like a badge of honor and gleefully submit to oppression, malfeasance and kleptocracy. You will buy anything. You will believe anything. You believe that evolution is a matter of belief. You likely scrolled down to #1, without reading the rest, because you’re an impatient, semi-literate Philistine who’s either unable or unwilling to digest more than 140 characters at a time. […] You believe in American exceptionalism despite the contrary, compelling and overwhelming evidence. You tacitly partake in all manner of atrocity without batting a lash. You’re actively participating in our species’ extinction and you’re either in denial or you just don’t give a shit.”
Time for some self-reflection.
Tags: 50 most loathsome Americans, Ian Murphy, Luke 6:37
Posted in In The News, Words of Christ | No Comments »
January 24th, 2011 by JEL
Martin Thielen wrote a book called “What’s the Least I Can Believe and Still Be a Christian?: A Guide to What Matters Most.” If you want a quick synopsis, you can check out this article. The opening is great:
“When I first met Danny, he said, ‘Preacher, you need to know that I’m an atheist. I don’t believe the Bible. I don’t like organized religion. And I can’t stand self-righteous, judgmental Christians.’
I liked him right away!”
They become friends, have lots of talks about faith, and slowly Danny moves from atheist to agnostic to reluctant Christian minimalist. When Danny asks him the question that became the title of the book, Thielen first listed things that Christians DON’T need to believe. I liked the list:
• God causes cancer, car wrecks and other catastrophes
• Good Christians don’t doubt
• True Christians can’t believe in evolution
• Woman can’t be preachers and must submit to men
• God cares about saving souls but not saving trees
• Bad people will be “left behind” and then fry in hell
• Jews won’t make it to heaven
• Everything in the Bible should be taken literally
• God loves straight people but not gay people
• It’s OK for Christians to be judgmental and obnoxious
Tags: Christianity, Martin Thielen, what's the least I can believe and still be a Christian
Posted in In The News, Words of Christ | No Comments »
January 20th, 2011 by JEL
It’s been kind of a rough week in Christian news, don’t you think? The new Alabama Governor, Robert Bentley, started off the week with this doozy of a quote:
“Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister, and I want to be your brother.”
He has since apologized, and as Jesus taught forgiveness, perhaps we’ll cut him a little slack. Then you’ve got Franklin Graham, son of Billy, complaining about the terrific Obama speech gave at the memorial for the Tucson shooting victims. Apparently there wasn’t enough Christian God in the text for Graham, so he made the gigantic leap to:
“They scoff at the name of Jesus Christ.”
So, I need a little reminder that there is some kindness and sanity in this world. For that, I’ll turn to the Southwest Airlines pilot who purposely delayed the departure of a flight so that one of his late-arriving passengers could make the trip to say goodbye to a dying grandson. When the passenger finally boarded, the pilot was there to greet him:
“They can’t go anywhere without me and I wasn’t going anywhere without you. Now relax. We’ll get you there. And again, I’m so sorry.”
Tags: act of kindness, AOK Thursday, Franklin Graham, Robert Bentley, Southwest Airlines
Posted in Acts of Kindness (AOK), In The News | No Comments »
January 18th, 2011 by JEL
As a college student back in 1944, Martin Luther King Jr. spent a summer picking tobacco in Simsbury, a small suburb of Hartford. Apparently, what he saw and what he was allowed to do had a profound effect on him. All the pickers lived in a dorm at the edge of the fields and his fellow Morehouse College bunkmates elected him their religious leader…setting him on the path to becoming a minister.
In Simsbury, he got to go to the same church as white people. He played baseball with whites. On the weekends, he went to Hartford and ate in the same restaurants and saw the same shows as whites.
“After that summer in Connecticut, it was a bitter feeling going back to segregation. I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.” –Martin Luther King Jr.
While all this may be mildly interesting to you, it’s hugely interesting to me. Simsbury is my hometown, and I know those tobacco fields well. I never picked leaves in the 100+ degrees under the netting, but friends and I would sometimes lie on top of the nets on a weekend night pondering the universe. This is the first I’ve ever heard of MLK in Simsbury. Civic pride.
Tags: Martin Luther King Jr., MLK, Simsbury, tobacco fields
Posted in In The News | No Comments »
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