But as even the most minimal attempts to hold to a Christian ethic—especially as it relates to sexual morality—made Christianity out of step with postmodern America, Evangelicals have slowly come to realize that they are no “moral majority” who represent the truest strain of the American spirit. We are instead “strangers and aliens,” after all. To be truly “Evangelical,” then, is to reject the often nominal Christianity and impotent ecclesiology that empowered their parents to divorce and their friends to wreck their lives. And the Gospel certainly isn’t “useful” in maintaining an already existing behavioral image in the ruins of Woodstock. Quote from Russel Moore published in First Things

my blogging page

Trying to write down a little of what I read- hard to be consistent with blogging when there are so many other things that are more important, yet still want to for personal and hopefully your benefit.

loving your enemy

Been thinking through the admonition to love your enemy. For most of us we turn the concept of having an enemy into some abstract hypothetical and comfort ourselves with the thought that if we ever did have an enemy we would treat them well. But since we don't have any enemies then we don't have to worry about it. Problem is we treat family like opposition and the people close to us as hostile. We take our "self- defense" as an excuse to "protect" ourselves. Essentially we're treating the people we are supposed to love most as enemies. When Jesus tells us to love our enemies he is telling us that we are to treat even our enemies with a love that is based upon life in God. There is a basic goodness that we are to treat all people with because there is a basic goodness that God treats all of us with. If we are supposed to love and essentially bless our enemies, just think how well we should treat the people who are our friends and family. All for the glory of Christ.

TolKien

" And after this 'nothing else really happened'. Tolkien did his job, raised his family, wrote his books, pre-eminently The Hobbit, which came out in 1937, and The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes in 1954-55. ... He retired from his second Oxford Chair in 1959. He remained all his life a committed Christian and Catholic, and died, tow years after his wife, in 1973. No extra-marital affairs, no sexual oddities, no scandals, strange accusations, or political involvement- nothing in a way for a poor biographer to get his teeth into." He was a philologist.

This description of the author endears his writings to me even more.

historian faith

I'm reading a book on the Reformation and the author is an Englishman whose family has been Anglican clergy continuously since 1890 and probably some before. He writes of himself:

I do not now personally subscribe to any form of religious dogma (although I do remember with some affection what it was like to do so).

How bittersweet that must be for him to write that on a book about the history of Christianity in his culture. To have nostalgia be the only tie to once firmly held beliefs must be traumatic (I'm sure interpreted by some as liberating) and I wonder how sad that experience must be. Much worse than a friendship that has faded maybe closer to a difficult divorce- but with no identifiable offending party or in the flesh person to blame.

home made

Just had some homemade yogurt and homemade granola. It really is amazing what fresh food tastes like.