Review “This book could start a revolution. Borg cracks open the encrusted words of faith and pops them into fresh language that people can understand and trust. The last time this happened, we got the Reformation.” (Anne …
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A brief literature review of cancer survival trials is employed by the author to raise questions on their design and to bring speculatively into discussion concepts such as “worldview”, “intentional normative dissociation”, and “psychosomatic plasticity-proneness”. Using prayer’s psychological dimension as …
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The message is that God’s intention – the order of the universe – is distributive justice-compassion. To live in the light is to transform water to wine: to bring healing to everyone, whether they are the children of collaborators with oppression, or ingrates that game the system.
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Thoughtful, progressive, inclusive, compassionate, intelligent, and non-dogmatic children’s curriculum.
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What is Holy Thursday about? Will we be thrown by the fact that Scripture scholars will say to us that maybe there wasn’t a “last supper?”
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Further, if John Dominic Crossan’s interpretation of Paul’s letters is correct – or at least on the track – the dry bones raised by Ezekiel become a metaphor for those who died in the service of God’s justice; those who died working to restore God’s distributive justice-compassion to God’s earth, and who themselves never saw the transformed earth.
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A connection that is not usually made with John’s Gospel in the context of the festivals of Tabernacles and especially of Lights (Hanukah) is the apocalyptic story told in Daniel. This story is set in the time of the Exile; but it was written during the Maccabean uprising and defeat of the Syrian-Greek invaders of the 160s bce.
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With chapter 7 the anti-Semitism that has haunted Christianity for centuries seems to become unavoidable.
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A particularly useful book crossed my desk recently: Bridging the God Gap: Finding Common Ground Among Believers, Atheists, and Agnostics (Living Arts Publications, 2011) by Roger Schriner, a retired Unitarian minister and psychotherapist from Northern California. In it, he describes the wide continuum of nuanced positions between “theism” and “atheism”, blurring the meaning of both terms.
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In Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism, thinker and philosopher Rajiv Malhotra addresses the challenge of a direct and honest engagement on differences, by reversing the gaze, repositioning India from being the observed to the observer and looking at the West from the dharmic point of view.
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Malhotra argues for a distinct Indian alternative to the assumption that Western constructs should define and describe the whole world. His book is an eye-opener, if we recognize the inner vision that can see the seldom-examined presuppositions we use to define and categorize the world.
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Most of my life, it is this Jesus in Mark’s gospel that I have encountered, rather than the Jesus of our traditions that tell us he can be found if only we seek him.
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For 21st century activists, from Occupy Wall Street regulars to poets such as Drew Dellinger,theologians such as Spong, Crossan, Borg, and Fox, the way to distributive justice-compassion for all beings on the Planet is our own flesh and blood.
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Yesterday (October 4th, 2011), the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement channeled Michael Jackson in “Thriller,” dressing up like zombies, complete with fake blood, stupefied stagger and an insatiable appetite for money.
It was blatant political theater of the absurd.
From Tiger Woods’ marital infidelity to same-sex marriage to the ‘Octomom,’ when sexuality issues dominate the headlines, there never seems to be a shortage of religious commentary—most of it from the right. While conservative pastors preach against …
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Before any of this can speak to 21st century post-modern, post-enlightenment, post-Christian minds (if it can), first remember that John’s Gospel is an extended proof – an argument.
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Retired Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong is used to being a lightning rod for religious debate. Known affectionately as “Jack” to his friends, Spong has been taking religious literalists to task for over 40 years.
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What has become clear among these liberal and progressive clergy is that although we do not know fully what the movement is or where it will wind up, we know that we are called to be there.
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