Persnickety

The new Museum of the Bible  has officially opened in Washington, D.C. It does not proselytize (openly). It does not apparently teach Creationism. It seems to be fairly open about certain narratives that ended up being, shall we say, in disrepute (slavery, ahem). It attempts, in the words of one of the directors, to make the Bible “cool.” Nice location, right near where the Smithsonian sits, not far from the Mall, so it takes in the gravitas of a serious museum along with a near hand-holding with government. One might be forgiven for thinking the Green’s (the Hobby Lobby family and chief funders of the museum) are acting within the Dominionist ideology, which states that Christians (meaning evangelical Christians, not those of the baser mainstream denominations, thank you very much) must integrate themselves into government. Can you say, “theocracy”? There is likely not going to be an exhibit showing visitors how the Green family stole artifacts , and was fined $3 milli...

We recently hosted a movie crew for five days. Twelve film students from the New York Film Academy  used our house as a film set--and hostel--to complete what was the final project for the year. The director/screenwriter/producer was a vivacious, very intelligent girl from China, who we had hosted a couple of years ago while she matriculated at a local high school. The project was fascinating to observe. Movies are omnipresent in our culture, but little is known of them outside the industry, as to how they get made, what is involved in their construction. What most people know about movies consists of the actors. Movie buffs will also wax on about this or that director, and you occasionally will hear something about some cinematographer. Nothing about the writers (there are always many, many writers, as in plural, within just one film), or the costume designers, or set designers, or the guy in charge of lighting or sound or editing. These people are anonymous, but nothing goe...

What is reality Joining religion to science Introduction Quantum Gravity Research, based in Los Angeles, has created a video uploaded to YouTube here , that attempts to explain Emergence Theory. Emergence Theory is based on the idea that our reality has a foundation of a crystalline “language” of geometric shapes of which our 4-dimensional reality is but the shadow or projection. Time is thought of as illusory, at least they do not see it as a moving arrow into the future.  It is more likely to be like a block of the ultimate crystalline shape: no past, no future. More of a Now. QGR appears to me to think time is still something, something that influences the whole. Here is where I cannot agree, or cannot understand their view, which is to say that time is in flux, but not showing the normal arrow into the future. Yet science does not show the future influencing the past. QGR views reality as information, information as reality: and it is, further, a reality that needs...

The church that I belong to seems old. It has lost the ability to grow and it deteriorates with age. But it isn’t old just in the sense of losing its capacity to grow, in its energy; it is old in the sense that it imagines itself as old, and places itself at a time more than one hundred years ago, around the time of 1850 or so. That was the time when science never heard of natural selection. A time that was still pre-industrial and climate change was far into the future. It was a time when race was solidly understood by the majority of people as a great divide and a biological imperative. It was a time before the age of mass destruction from warfare and mass shootings. It was a time before even the term “homosexual” was known and used, and certainly not other terms such as “trans-sexual,” “queer,” “gay.” It was pre-dispensationalist, and so end times were not given so easily as an excuse for inaction. It was a time before the landmark collection, Essays and Reviews , was publish...

God is in control. So say the evangelicals after the Trump election. So says Michael Gerson albeit in a more honest and intellectual way (I have pasted his column to the end of this blog). And so say I, though with a different inflection, a different meaning entirely, from the Christian Right. Today I saw that, while traveling in a plane to the finals in Colombia, the Brazilian soccer team,  Chapacoense , crashed and all but three team members and some from the crew perished. God is in control. God is good, all the time. So says the evangelical Right. Aleppo battle continues. 16,000 civilians flee. God is in control. God is good. All the time. Think of the God of the Now. Think of His presence throughout all the created universe, His influence, His power, His essence. Where is this God, this He? Nowhere. Not in heaven, which is not a place any telescope can point out; not on Mars or any star; He is not in the Kuiper Belt or in the sun or on the dark side of ...

After some deliberation, when I wondered if I actually meant The Poetry of Religion, I've settled on things as they currently rest. "The Poetry of Religion" would emphasize the endpoint of religion, presumably with its different categorizes of doctrine and spiritual subjectivity, even myth. It states that poetry is a way of seeing religion, a way of describing it, experiencing it. That isn't the way that I think religion works at all. Rather, it is the poetry that we experience, not the religion. It is more correct to say that we form our religions out of poetry, not the poetry from the our religion. Poetry has, at least within the English-speaking world where I reside, hit upon tough times. Virtually no one reads poetry anymore, other than a few serious practitioners (it is true, though, that many do write poetry but few of them take it so seriously as to study it, revere it, and take it into themselves as mental food). It isn't strange then to conclude that fe...

What Hans Christian Von Baeyer once said of science ( Discover , March 1996) should also be applied to the church and spirituality: "Science, in other words, thrives on anomaly, inconsistency, controversy, and doubt. Certainty kills it." Whereas certainty comes from the mind, doubt comes from the body: an experience leaves the question, What has happened? Who am I , now that this instance, this thing, has occurred? Certainty says, This is so because X is Y . It is an answer. And the answers which the old church is leaving us are proving unsatisfactory. Perhaps the New Church should be like a ship at sea, not at port. The existing church sits at dry dock, getting its repairs done and reviewing its rules and regs: No homosexuality. Belief in transubstantiation (or not). Belief in infant baptism (or adult). The rules for Christ's divinity--all the stuff that has been worked out in creeds and so forth. The ship is painted with the colors of burdensome connotations: j...