Living as an Ignatian Christian
by Maria Anderson
This post has been in the making for months, and I have been dragging my feet. Today it became apparent to me WHY it has been so hard to write this: Ignatian Christianity is NOT about learning something new in your head. I cannot write a nice essay on it, [...]
The Moral Failure of the New Atheists
The “New Atheists” are often compared to the fundamentalists** they rail against, by both religious and secular critics. These criticisms are often rebuked by some sort of argument based on empiricism or rationality, quite removing the real indictment that is being made and the moral failure the New Atheists* are in the midst of. The [...]
Why I am Emergent
When I’m with Emergent types, I often get asked “Why are you Episcopalian” which I have many answers (including this one I gave to Bruce Reyes-Chow) to and most respect. But when I’m with Episcopalians I often get a turned up eye and a weird look when I say I’m interested in the Emerging Church. [...]
U.S. Religion: Post-secular, More Secular, Post-christian?
In an Emergent Outliers discussion a few weeks ago the question came up as to whether the US is becoming more secular, is post-secular, post-Christian, or just post-denominational. Tough set of words to sort out. So much of what one will define the religious situation depends on one’s religious lifeworld. It is one’s own religious place [...]
Orthopraxadoxy
We like to dichotomize things. It makes our lives much easier when things can be easily compartmentalized and divided. But the problem with that tendency is that it creates unneeded — and often blatantly false — polarities and bifurcations. These type of constructions are endemic in the modern church and some of the more common [...]
Is Mainline Christianity Irrelevant?
Mainline churches have been declining for decades. Such sad news is not new. As Greeley & Hout (2006) argue, the reason for this is primarily two-fold: 1) people in “conservative” denominations are switching to mainline churches at a much reduced rate and 2) people in conservative churches tend to have more babies. On the one [...]
The Heresy Line
As I write this, the Episcopal Presiding Bishop is still delivering her keynote speech. Evidently it has something about the great Western Heresy and it concerns individual versus communal salvation. There is already some blow-back. Until I hear more about it, I don’t have much to say on that particular issue.
But it does raise a [...]
Our Abandonment By God
I decided to take a stab at the feeds today, and the first one I read was this one.. and it knocked me on my butt.
Now, while I am still often overwhelmed by the beauty and goodness of our world, I am also, or perhaps even more often, overwhelmed by the brokenness of our world. [...]
