Persnickety

I’ve been asked if I am a Christian. I said that No, not in the way that most people think of the term. I wanted to say more--so much more--but felt that there wasn’t enough time and besides, I was too tired to get into it. So I’d like to get into it. When someone asks me Am I a Christian, I want to say Yes, but… or No, but… I also want to just say what someone wrote in a blog on Patheos (apologies but I cannot find the source) when she said that she was “a human being.” It would be nice to just sometimes leave it at that. I do and I don’t believe in the resurrection of Jesus. I do and don’t believe in his divinity. By that, I believe in the narratives (there are more than one) and their power and their truth. But I don’t understand those narratives to be some overarching historical artifact. Because I don’t feel that there is any overarching historical foundation to any narrative. In other words, there is only narrative. That is it. There is nothing beyond that. Nothing...

Evangelical Christianity has failed, and has failed for want of sincerity. In order to explain, here is a paragraph from "Hugh Kenner's "A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers" (pp 203-4): One thing very engaging about the first half of the book [I.A. Richards' Practical Criticism ] is Richards's genial aplomb as he sorts out the comments, never soliciting the knowing snicker. It's clear how his auditors could feel they were helping with a scientific inquiry, not being trapped into acts of self-exposure. And it's exhilarating still to watch the co-author of The Meaning of Meaning make a useful word out of such a rubber stiletto as "insincerity." This Richards defines as "the flaw that insinuates itself when a writer cannot distinguish his own genuine promptings from those he would merely like to have, or those which he hopes will make a good poem. Such failures on his part to achieve complete imaginative integrity may show t...

Today I finally received the answer to the question I’ve asked nearly all my life: Does God care about football? Richard John Mouw informs me [TU, Voices of Faith, 2/3/18¹] that “God cares much about how the game is played. And it is not simply about how the players treat each other.” Has Mr Mouw read the New Testament? I get that the Old Testament is quite football-worthy, what with all that smiting and so forth, but it sure seems that the NT becomes quite un-football-esque in places. But maybe that’s just me. It’s not as if Matthew 25, or the Sermon on the Mount comes down on the side of how we treat one another. Did not Jesus say it best when he offered us, "Do to others what you want them to do to you...and hit ‘em hard! Knock his block off. Role the replay!" No, he didn’t say exactly that, but one can imagine him saying it...if you pretend for a moment that you live in the universe of Richard John Mouw. I’d leave football out of the equation. No spectacle where...