Persnickety

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin Dance me through the panic till I'm gathered safely in Lift me like an olive branch be my homeward dove And dance me to the end of love .-- Leonard Cohen and this made me think that this could easily be a Sufi poem, something like S uddenly the drunken sweetheart appeared out of my door. She drank a cup of ruby wine and sat by my side. Seeing and holding the lockets of her hair My face became all eyes, and my eyes all hands.-- Rumi [Translator: Shahram Shiva] Mary Blye Howe's book, Sitting With Sufis, instructs us that: "For the Sufi, Love is the path to God. Rumi tells us that only the person whose garment is 'rent by the violence of love' can be be wholly pure from covetousness and sin." And this love is not the "agape" love that protestants like to portray it as, or rather, it is and it isn't. Agape love is a general term, one that can also include the passion of a lo...

Is Evangelical Christianity the worst evil ever manifested by humanity, as averred by a recent online article ? No, I do not believe that. I put that in there to manifest not its inherent evil but to 1) prod the reader; and 2) to bring up the underlying premise of that article: what is required of a Christian? The blog's author, CK Ratzer, basically states that nothing is required. Christ has given his Grace once and for all and the Law is without effect (this is the antinomian view, from anti= against; nomos= law). That is the Good News. He then postulates that Evangelical Christianity preaches a "mixed" gospel, one of repentance and grace, then one of required action, action that never accumulates into goodness, but is a cause of guilt and shame and never-ending judgmentalism. Anyway, I didn't want to argue what he has already argued. Read the article and see for yourself. As to what is required... We know that "repent" is a mis-translation. It m...