Sunday's Prayer

O Lord, renew our spirits and draw our hearts to Yourself that our work may not be to us a burden, but a delight. And give to us such a mighty love of You as may sweeten all our obedience. Oh, let us not serve You with the spirit of bondage as slaves, but with the cheerfulness and gladness of children, delighting ourselves in You and rejoicing in Your work.
--Benjamin Jenks (1646-1724)

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Saturday's Poem

I am nearly finished reading The Stream & the Sapphire by Denise Levertov. I have thoroughly enjoyed this little book of her religious poetry. This is the first book of poems by Levertov that I have read, and I must say that I love her poetry. I want to share a snippet from one of her smaller poems in the book with the title, "Primary Wonder" (33).

Days pass when I forget the mystery.
....
and then
once more the quiet mystery
is present to me, the throng's clamor
recedes: the mystery
that there is anything anything at all,
let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything,
rather than void: and that, O Lord,
creator, Hallowed One, You still,
hour by hour sustain it.

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Thought for the Day

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect, has intended us to forgo their use.
--Galileo

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Thought for the Day

No farmer ever plowed a field by turning it over in his mind.
--George E. Woodbury

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Flash Forward

This Sunday we will have a guest speaker, Grace Okall0, who will share her story, one that fits into our series, "Where is God in Evil?" Grace is from Northern Uganda and was forced to fight in the Lord's Resistance Rebellion Army after she was kidnapped from an all girls school. She escaped after 7 1/2 months. She has used her experience as a platform to build awareness around "Child Soldiers" worldwide, speaking to Congress, the UN as well as doing television interviews with Oprah Winfrey. A recent graduate of Gordon College, Grace is married and she and her husband Jonathon are expecting a child at the end of October.

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Thought for the Day

Prayer of the modern American: "Dear God, I pray for patience. And I want it right now!"
--Oren Arnold

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End Marriage After 7 Years?

In find more and more articles in the media criticizing the institution of marriage, whether it is discussing how badly marriage is doing at present, offering a very different picture of what marriage should be, or arguing that the very best thing that could happen is the removal of marriage completely. Here is a new proposal that I haven't heard before: marriage should automatically expire after seven years. You can click on the article, "Glamorous politician wants law to allow 7-year itch," to read it. I intend to comment on this issue by blogging on the book The Future of Marriage by David Blankenhorn which I hope to get back to in the near future.

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Thought for the Day

Common sense in an uncommon degree is what the world calls wisdom.
--Anonymous

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Revolution Inside the Cell

There was a fascinating article in the Health/Science section of the Boston Globe yesterday. In "DNA Unraveled," we learn that the science at the subcelluar level is undergoing at present a revolution.

What scientists once believed true about DNA and genes has unraveled over the last several years, and the findings are occurring so quickly researchers are finding it disorienting. Substances like "junk DNA" and RNA on which scientists thought they had a good handle turn out to be far more important than once thought. Isidore Rigoutsos, a lead scientist at an IBM research center says, "The picture that's emerging is so immensely more complicated than anyone imagined, it's almost depressing."

A couple of years ago I took a course on biology through the Teaching Company especially for the purpose of helping me to understand DNA and its functioning. The new discoveries are making the things that I learned incorrect. Oh well...

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Thought for the Day

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.
--Lillian Hellman

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

Yesterday I continued the series on "Where is God in Evil?" Both scriptures and orthodox Christian theology maintains that God is all-powerful and God is love. Theodicy tries to explain how this can be: how a just God that is all-powerful and love itself can then allow for the reality of evil, natural evil and moral evil.

Some respond to the reality of evil by believing that God is all-powerful and not good. In this case you can either spend life trying to appease and manipulate this angry god or you can shake your fist at this god and try to live as best you can. You can also decide that God does not exist, and that we are on are own.

Some respond by believing that God is good but not all-powerful. God is not the source of evil and suffering, but God is not able to prevent it from happening. This is the conclusion that Rabbi Harold Kushner came to in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

The theological understanding of a major stream of orthodox Christian theology is to acknowledge that both God is all-powerful and God is good and that freedom has something to do with the current state of affairs. David Bentley Hart in The Doors of the Sea writes about God's freedom and its relation to evil in this way:

For God is infinite actuality, the source and end of all being, the eternally good, for whom mere arbitrary "choice"--as among possibilities that somehow exceed his "present" actuality--would be a deficiency, a limitation placed upon his infinite power to be God. His freedom is the impossibility of any force, pathos, or potentiality interrupting the perfection of his nature of hindering him in the realization of his own illimitable goodness, in himself and in his creatures. To be "capable" of evil--to be able to do evil or to be affected by an encounter with it--would in fact be an incapacity in God; and to require evil to bring about his good ends would make him less than the God he is. The object of God's will is his own infinite goodness, and it is an object perfectly realized, and so he is free (71-72).

According to Hart, God has made the creation in freedom and in that very freedom is the possibility of resisting God and God's will. He writes, "God has fashioned creatures in his image so that they might be joined in a perfect union with him in the rational freedom of love. For that very reason, what God permits, rather than violate the autonomy of the created world, may be in itself contrary to what he wills" (82).

This does not give a definitive answer, but for me it opens up "space" that I can ponder. Can it be that the freedom that God has given to creation is so important that God will not violate that freedom even though God could choose to do so? One of the points that Hart makes--reflecting on a point of Thomas Aquinas-- is that even though God gives the creation freedom, that the misuse of that freedom cannot ultimately "prevent him from accomplishing the good he intends in all things" (83). The good that God intends is based on God's work in Jesus on the cross and in the resurrection. It is to this that we will turn in the concluding sermon this week.

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Thought for the Day

If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
--Mark Twain

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Sunday's Prayer

Direct me, O Lord, in all my doings with your most gracious favor, and further me with your continual help; that in all my work begun, continued, and ended in you, I may glorify your holy name, and finally, by your mercy, obtain everlasting life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
--The Divine Hours

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Saturday's Poem

Here is a poem by George Herbert who lived from 1593-1633. The title is Prayer (I).

Prayer, the church's banquet, angels' age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tower,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days' world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well dressed,
The Milky Way, the bird of Paradise,

Church bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,
The land of spices; something understood.

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Thought for the Day

Choose your neighbor before your house and your companion before the road.
--Arab Proverb

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Religious Literature in Federal Prisons

If you haven't been following it, the Federal prisons in an attempt to prevent prisoners from reading religious literature that promotes violence and terrorism, has decided that each religion can have only 150 books in the libraries. No one knows exactly who is making that decision and who decides which books should be on prison library shelves. In fact, an important question is how the government can make this determination in light of the 1st Amendment.

An article in the New York Times this morning reports on the continuing saga. It is an issue on which the left and the right seem to agree and about which the Bureau of Prisons is not willing to change. Sojourners, a liberal evangelical organization, had 15,000 of their readership send emails to the Bureau of Prisons demanding that they change this policy.

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Thought for the Day

Good things are not done in a hurry.
--German Proverb

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Flash Forward

This Sunday I am continuing the series "Where is God in Evil?" and will be using Job 42:1-6, Acts 17:22-28, and John 13:34-35 as the scripture. As last week I wanted to help set the context by talking about theodicy and defining evil, this week I want to explore what God's sovereignty and God's providence might mean. How we understand these concepts has important implications for our understanding of theodicy? We will look at J. L. Mackie's argument that states that based on assessing the evidence of both nature and history, we must either conclude that God is all-powerful but not good, or good but not all-powerful.

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Thought for the Day

Shared joy is double joy, and shared sorrow is half-sorrow.
--Swedish Proverb

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Is it Fingernail Biting Time?

As you Red Sox followers are aware, they are now only two and a half games ahead of the Yankees. I must confess that I can't follow the games too closely, because I get so wrapped up them that I don't sleep well at night. If they lose, I am so disappointed that I toss and turn all night, and if they win, I am so pumped that I toss and turn all night. So I have discovered that for my own emotional well being, when it gets this close to the end of the regular season, I have to maintain a certain emotional distance so that I can sleep. I'm wondering if anyone else is as neurotic as I am?

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Thought for the Day

It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
--Mark Twain

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The Reason for Being

I read with interest the article in the Ideas section of Sunday's Boston Globe, "Why Are We Here?" by Anthony Kronman, a professor of Law at Yale.

He notes sadly that all of the young men and women who began college over the last several weeks will not at their college or university have a way of exploring answers to the question, Why am I here? He writes, "In a shift of historic importance, America's colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life's most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied."

I agree with him. He recounts how "our top universities have embraced a research-driven ideal that has squeezed the question of life's meaning from the college curriculum." At the same time, young people are hungry for meaning, for understanding the world and their place in it: they are hungry to wrestle with the big questions of life, but for which the current universities are not prepared.

He wants to promote a nonreligious nondoctrinaire approach. He believes that students need exposure to some of the great works of philosophy, literature, and art as well as to conversations in which these works are engaged like Augustine wrestling with Plato and Hobbes with Aristotle.

I thought the tone of what he said in the few references he made to religion was a bit condenscending and dismissive, but in general I think his point is well made.

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Thought for the Day

Common sense is not so common.
--Voltaire

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

Yesterday I continued my sermon series, "Where Is God?", by addressing the question, "Where is God in Evil?" I think this topic is an important one examine for disciples of Jesus, so that we can live faithfully and with integrity in a culture that is not comfortable with the notion of evil. N. T. Wright in his book, Evil and the Justice of God, argues that modern people respond to evil in three ways: 1) we tend to ignore evil unless it's in our face; 2) when evil does impact our lives we are surprised; and 3) our response, then, is "immature and dangerous."

I tried to set some of the groundwork for further exploration of this topic. I noted that the theological term for the problem of evil is, theodicy, and the classic question with which theodicy deals is, "If there is a God and God is (as Jewish, Muslin, and Christian theology all claim) a good, wise, and supremely powerful God, then why is their such a thing as evil (19)? I think, as followers of Jesus, it is a hard question, and we must wrestle with this question and not slip into giving facile or shallow answers to it.

I also spent some time defining evil relying on the definitions i gleaned from N. T. Wright's book and from David Bentley Hart's book, The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the Tsunami? Hart is an Eastern Orthodox Theologian who is well-versed in Western theology as well as philosophy. Wright defines evil as: "the force of anti-creation, anti-life, the force which opposes and seeks to deface and destroy God’s good world of space, time, and matter, and above all God’s image-bearing human creatures" (89). Hearkening back to Thomas Aquinas and other ancient theologians, Hart writes, "Christian tradition’s most venerable and indispensable…commitments is the definition of evil as…a privation of the good, a purely parasitic corruption of created reality, possessing no essence or nature of its own” (73).

Wright gives what I found a helpful understanding of reality as a hole or a missing wrung on a ladder. In fact, he refers to evil as a moral and spiritual black hole. I also like the analogy of evil as a virus, a parasite that can't live on its own, but can only survive on its host, the good. This understanding at one and the same time acknowledges the reality of evil (unlike Christian Science, for example, and some Eastern religions that teach that evil is an illusion) but that it has a different kind of reality that the good created world.

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Thought for the Day

We need to restore the full meaning of that old word, duty. It is the other side of rights.
--Pearl S. Buck

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Sunday's Prayer

O God, because without you we are not able to please you, mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule my heart; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
--The Divine Hours

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Saturday's Poem

I am in a small writing group whose purpose is to help give each of us the discipline to write and to give constructive criticism so that our writing improves. We share poems, essays, and other things that we might choose to write. In our last meeting, one of our group, Margi Goetz, shared a poem that we all liked very much. She gave me her permission to post in on my blog. So here it is:

Gentle Reign

Lord, I want a flash of lightning and a burning bush!
To feel caught hold of and all shook up;
to feel a reckless, breathless, fearless, no less than
crazy kind of love from you.

I wonder why?

I don't really like big storms. I like gentle rain.
I generally prefer non-combustible flora; like daisies.
I'm not a fast, hot sizzling wok kind of girl.
I'm more of an all day, slow-simmering stew kind of girl.

So why do I want You to show up all fast and loud and showy?

I guess I just want to be sure.
Sure that You're there. Sure that You notice me.
That I'm special enough for special effects on my account.
Mostly to be sure You know me.

You really do know me thought, don't you?

You know I like gentle rain and daisies and stew.
You know my mind slows down when my pulse speeds up.
You know I will find you in quiet contemplation
though you are everywhere I seek.

Lord, I know something about You too.

I know You are there in the storms and the rain.
I know You hung on a cross on my account.
I know You love me as I am;
who You make me to be.

Thank you for your fearless, gentle reign over me.

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Thought for the Day

Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words.
--Dorothy Parker

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Yankees Coming to Town

The pennant race intensifies this weekend with the Yankees coming to Fenway. I must say I'm pretty excited about it and hope that the Sox do a much better job than they did several weeks ago at Yankee stadium. Is anyone lucky enough to have tickets to any of the games? Any predictions? Dice-K has to take it to another level if we hope to win the game tonight, I think.

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Thought for the Day

Probably nothing in the world arouses more false hopes than the first four hours of a diet.
--Dan Bennett

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Flash Forward

The next several Sunday's I want to explore in our "Where is God?" series, "Where is God in Evil?" The texts are: Judges 2:6-13, Ephesians 6:10-18, and Luke 13:1-5. It was the destruction of the Twin Towers in Manhattan six years ago that brought evil back into the spotlight.

From a Christian point of view, you can say that the problem of evil is probably the most difficult to explain or understand. In theological terms we are dealing with theodicy, "the justification of a deity's justice and goodness in light of suffering and evil" (Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, Donald McKim, 239). If God is good and loving, how can God allow, permit, make happen things like tsunamis, earthquakes, hurricanes (natural evil) and holocausts, slavery, child abuse, etc. (moral evil)?

These are difficult questions that philosophers and theologians have been addressing for centuries. I hope perhaps to do a little more than scratch the surface of this issue, but invite you to think and meditate about this issue. We live in a culture that for the most part, I believe, as a very inadequate view of evil.

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Thought for the Day

Poetry is not the assertion of truth, but the making of that truth more fully real to us.
--T. S. Eliot

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Praying the Hours

For the last couple of months I have begun to pray the "Hours," which means that I have been engaging in fixed-hour prayer. The psalmist writes, "Seven times a day do I praise you" in Psalm 119:164 and this led to praying at fixed times seven times a day in Judaism. Early Christians continued this practice and by the fifth century with Benedictine monasticism, the "daily offices" were largely in place. St Benedict said, "To pray is to work, to work is to pray." "In so doing," according to Phyllis Tickle, the the compiler of The Divine Hours, "he gave form to another of the great, informing concepts of Christian spirituality--the inseparability of spiritual life from physical life. He also formalized the concept of 'divine work'" (x).

Praying the daily offices does a couple of things for me. First, it helps give rhythm to my day. the Morning Office is done sometime between 6:00 a.m. and 9:00 a.m., the Midday Office is done sometime between 11:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m., Vespers is done between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m., and Compline is done before bed. It takes 5-7 minutes, includes a lot of short readings from the Psalms, and some wonderful prayers. many of the prayers are taken from the Book of Common Prayer, the center of worship for the Anglican church.

The other thing that it accomplishes for me is to remind me of God. One of the goals of my spiritual life is to be more mindful of God during the day. This helps me to do that.

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Thought for the Day

Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street.
--Anonymous

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Thought for the Day

All men who live with any degree of serenity live by some assurance of grace.
--Reinhold Niebuhr

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The Monday Morning Quarterback

In yesterday's sermon, Where is God?", the text upon which I focused was Psalm 77. Referring to Mother Theresa's struggle with a sense of God's absence, even God's abandonment, I tried to make sense of it through both scripture and Christian History.

God deals with each of us uniquely, and so our experience of God is unique. For example, St. Francis de Sales who lived in the seventeenth century and wrote An Introduction to the Devout Life, reported that his experience of God was so close, 15 minutes was the greatest duration of time that he was not aware of God's presence. On the other hand, the experience of many spiritual masters included a sense--sometimes for very long periods of time--of God's utter absence. St. John of the Cross wrote about this "dark night of the soul."

I was aware not long after Mother Theresa's death that she had experienced this long dark night of the soul. When the new book on her came out and I read some articles about it and the depth of this "darkness," I must admit that it made me cringe and tell God that I hoped He wouldn't put me through something like that.

But, if in our following Jesus we do experience the dark night of the soul, we shouldn't be surprised that it happens to some. Our task is to stay engaged with God. We need to 1) voice our experience, our doubts, our feeling abandoned to God and not pretend that everything is OK. 2) We need to remember the past, to remember this great story of which we are apart, God's acting not only in history but also in our own lives. 3) We need to remind ourselves that feelings of God's presence is not the only evidence of our faith. Feelings are important to our lives, but we shouldn't run our lives based on our feelings. 4) We need spiritual friends with whom we can share our struggle. Mother Theresa had a series of spiritual directors and advisors, and confidants that she used to share her struggle. We need one another and we need trusted spiritual friends with whom we can share our struggle, receive good counsel, and be in prayer.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Scot McKnight is blogging on the book. He has blogged about it today. I find his reviews interesting, informative, and thought-provoking.

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Thought for the Day

The Church of God has to be the salt and light of the world. We are the hope of the hopeless, through the power of God. We must transfigure a situation of hate and suspicion, of brokenness and separation, of fear and bitterness. We have no option. We are servant to the God who reigns and cares.
--Desmond Tutu

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Sunday's Prayer

O God, you make me glad with the weekly remembrance of the glorious resurrection of your son my Lord: Give me this day such blessing through my worship of you, that the week to come may be spent in your favor; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
--Daily Hours

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Saturday's Poem

I am in the process of reading the poems of Madeleine L'Engle who just died yesterday. She won the John Newbery Award for the best children's book in 1963, A Wrinkle in Time. I thought it would be appropriate to share a portion of one of her poems today in honor of her.

From St. Luke's Hospital (2)

To my Guardian Angel

Beauty and form's singular absence
Has embarrassed me before the Power
Who made all loveliness. In the hour

When the Fall's result, dark ugliness,
Shakes my body, you, Angel, come,
Solid and familiar as a nanny in the room.

.....

sustained by your stern confidence
In the holiness of all created things
I rest within the comfort of your wings.

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Thought for the Day

When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.
--Helen Keller

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More on Mother Theresa

For those of you interested, Scot McKnight has started blogging on the book, Mother Theresa: Come Be My Light, which contains the journal entries and letters of Mother Theresa. He began blogging about it today and will blog about it for the next couple of weeks. I really enjoy reading his book reviews.

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Thought for the Day

Man's capacity for justice makes democracy possible; but man's inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.
--Reinhold Niebuhr

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Life as a Masterpiece

I read an interesting article in the New York Times Op-Ed section this morning by E. O. Wilson, a renowned professor emeritus from Harvard University. E. O. Wilson who is an incredibly good scientist and a scientific materialist (a person who only believes that matter and energy are all that exist, i.e., no God, gods, or spiritual dimension) who has recently joined the chorus of scientist who have written books to debunk God, writes about the need to discover and catalogue all of the species that exist on planet earth. He says that we only know about 10 percent of them! Wow. I was surprised by that statistic.

In the middle of the article I found this statement which I thought interesting: "Why bother making such an effort? Because each species from a bacterium to a whale is a masterpiece of evolution. Each has persisted, its mix of genes slowly evolving, for thousands to millions of years. And each is exquisitely adapted to its environment and interlocks with a legion of other species to form the ecosystems upon which our own lives ultimately depend." The phrase that caught my attention is "masterpiece of evolution." I went to Dictionary.com and looked up the word "masterpiece." These are some of the definitions :"1. a person's greatest piece of work, as in an art. 2. anything done with masterly skill: a masterpiece of improvisation. 3. a consummate example of skill or excellence of any kind: The chef's cake was a masterpiece."

I was struck how he was using a noun, "masterpiece," which applies to a sentient being. My point here, to be clear, is not to argue about evolution, evolution without a Being behind it. How can an impersonal process create a masterpiece? It reminds me of Harvard Psychologist Stephen Pinker's and fellow scientific materialist concluding his article on the brain in Time some months ago. He conclude by saying that we should "give thanks" for the complexity of the mind. I think "give thanks" is the exact wording, but I didn't go back and check. Again, the language infers a sentient being to whom one would give thanks.

I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but when talking about creation and life, scientific materialists always end up using nouns and adjectives that assume sentie

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Flash Forward

This Sunday I intend to begin a sermon series entitled, "Where is God?" Mother Theresa's letters that were recently published and the interest that it piqued in the press is the instigator for the series. Many inside and outside the church were shocked by these revelations about her inner struggles with God and faith.

So the focus of this Sunday's sermon is "Where is God in faith?" I have chosen as texts for the sermon Psalm 77 and Luke 7:18-23. If you have a chance, read Psalm 77 in The Message: I think that it helps to bring out the sense of the psalmists state of mind.

How do you explain Mother Theresa's arid spiritual state for nearly 45 years? What do you make of her wrestling with doubt? Some have accused her of hypocrisy. Do agree?

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Thought for the Day

Indifference never wrote great works, nor thought out striking inventions, nor reared the solemn architecture that awes the soul, nor breathed sublime music, nor painted glorious pictures, nor undertook heroic philanthropies. All these grandeurs are born of enthusiasm, and are done heartily.
--Anonymous

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The Future of Marriage

This past summer I read the book, The Future of Marriage, by David Blankenhorn, the founder and the current president of the Institute for American Values, an organization whose purpose is to strengthen families and civil society, and the author of Fatherless in America.

As both a pastor, pastoral counselor, and psychologist, whose specialty is couple's counseling, I have a great interest in making families stronger. We live in a culture, however, that has for decades seen the weakening of the family and now a full court press to redefine the family in ways that I think are destructive to persons and society. The discussion carried on in the media is in my opinion not only flawed, but incredibly shallow and one-sided. Blankenhorn's book is a welcome addition to the debate that currently rages in our society as to the definition and nature of the family. Over the next several weeks I intend to blog about this book, chapter by chapter, because I think it is so important and what he has to say has not been heard by many.

Today I want to summarize the introduction to this book. Blankenhorn attributes a conversation that he had with the executive director, Evan Wolfson, of Freedom to Marry, an advocacy group for equal rights for same-sex couples. Wolfson wanted Blankenhorn to speak out for their position. He felt conflicted about the request and it caused him to do the research, thinking, and writing to develop a position that he believed in. He writes,
In talking to Evan, I also realized that we disagreed fundamentally on the matter of children.

Other than telling me that he thought children were "adaptable," he seemed hardly interested in the issue, as if he had never really thought about it. For example, when I told him that marriage as an institution is centrally concerned 2with procreation in all human societies, he rejected the idea out of hand, proposing instead that marriage aw a natural human institution is largely about private property...For me, marriage is fundamentally about the needs of children. And in thinking and writing about it for nearly two decades, I have come to believe one thing with more certainty than anything else: What children need most are mothers and fathers. Not caregivers. Not parent-like adults. Not even "parents." What a child wants and needs more than anything else are the mother and the father who together made the child, who love the child, and who love each others (2-3).

He states that marriage is the most important of all social institutions and from an evolutionary and anthropological point of view "the decisive turning point in our history as a species" (4). Marriage, Blankenhorn believes is by far the most pro-child institution that we have. He notes that in the 70's and 80's when the amount of divorce was drastically increasing, the majority of opinion by scholars was that children's well-being was only marginally associated with marriage and family structure. However, after a plethora of research conducted in the 80's and 90's the results caused a drastic reassessment of this previous position and, in fact, overturned it. The research clearly demonstrated that marriage matters. It makes a significant impact on the health and well-being of our children.

Blankenhorn concludes his introduction by saying,

If our national debate on same-sex marriage is finally to be redemptive rather than divisive, it needs to meet two tests. First, it must not only accept but also deepen and advance the principle that all persons are equal in rights and dignity. Second, it must also help us rediscover and renew marriage as the main protector of our children and our primary social institution" (8).

I'm hoping that this book review generates some good discussion about this very important topic.

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Thought for the Day

A man should not act as a judge either for someone he loves or for someone he hates. For no man can see the guilt of someone he loves or the good qualities in someone he hates.
--Talmud

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Religious Pluralism: Robust or Tepid?

An article in the Op-Ed section of the Boston Globe caught my attention as I was reading this morning. "A Tin Ear on Religion" by Michael Gerson addresses the issue of religious pluralism and issues surrounding it.

While the author is criticizing an ad criticizing a Republican running for office in South Louisiana the Democratic party placed in a newspaper, for me illustrates some of the difficulties surrounding what we mean when we talk about religious pluralism. The Republican candidate, Bobby Jindal, is a Roman Catholic convert from Hinduism who is vocal about his faith. He told the author, "I'm proud of my faith. I believe in God, that Jesus died and rose. I can't divide my public and private conscience. I can't stop being a Christian, and wouldn't want to for a moment of the day." Referring to his faith as "robust," Gerson notes that he wrote in the 1990's about his belief that Roman Catholicism makes more sense to him than Protestantism. Apparently the local Democratic party has tried to create a wedge between Protestants and Roman Catholics over this position.

The point which he raises in all of this and which I do think captures an important dimension of our current postmodern culture is the idea that pluralism "means a public square purged of intolerance--defined as the belief in exclusive truth-claims and absolute right and wrong. " He quotes Jindal concerning this attitude: "This would be a poorer society if pluralism meant the least common denominator, if we couldn't hold a passionate, well-articulated belief system. If you enforce a liberalism devoid of content, you end up with the very violations of freedom you were trying to prevent in the first place." The author notes that some of the strongest defenders of Jindal's position are those who don't share is beliefs, like the senior pastor of the First Baptist Church of New Orleans, David Crosby who wrote, Any body who read this whole article (an article in the Times-Picayune about Jindal's writings) and ends up angry just needs to grow up." Gerson uses this response as a stepping-stone for his definition of pluralism: "an adult respect for the strong convictions of others."

My own experience of both ecumenical (between various Christian faith traditions) and interfaith between Christian and other religions) dialogue has frequently been what Gerson calls lowest common denominator dialogue. I find these kinds of discussions bland and boring and generally not very enlightening. I would far rather engage in discussions with people of integrity and passion who believe what they believe and are willing to discuss them respectfully.

What do you think? What has your experience been?

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I Survived the Game

As I mentioned in one of yesterday's blogs, I attended the Red Sox game last night. You couldn't have asked for better weather: the temperature was 79 degrees at the start of the game, and there was a nice breeze as well.

Things went along very nicely until the sixth inning when Dice-K fell apart. I didn't time the sixth inning, but it must have gone on for close to an hour. The Blue Jays scored 8 runs, the Sox used three pitchers, and in the bottom of the 6th, the Red Sox scored three times and I think the Jays used two pitchers. The game had a happy ending for Sox fans, however, as we won 13-10. The score actually looks more like an NFL score does it not?

In any case, we were glad the Sox won and made it to bed a little after midnight.

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Thought for the Day

The best way out is always through.
--Robert Frost

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A Trip to Fenway

What could be better after a gorgeous Labor Day weekend than ending it with a trip to Fenway (and hopefully a win)? I don't go to many Red Sox games during the year, but we purchased some tickets for tonight's game against Toronto. After Buchholtz's stellar performance on Saturday and Lester's yesterday, I'm hoping that Dice K can keep the Sox on a roll so that I don't have to spend the end of the season on antianxiety medication!

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Thought for the Day

Love is never more potent than when it is given as a response to hatred.
--Chad W. Thompson

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Sunday's Prayer

Christ as a light
Illumine and guide me!
Christ as a shield overshadow and cover me!
Christ be under me! Christ be over me!
Christ be beside me,
On left hand and right!
Christ be before me, behind me, about me!
Christ, this day, be within and without me!
--St. Patrick

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Saturday's Poem

I just started reading The Stream & the Sapphire, a book of poetry by Denise Levertov. She took poems from seven different volumes of her poetry, and collected them in this book as a way of chronicling her own journey from agnosticism to Christianity, "a movement incorporating much of doubt and questioning as well as of affirmation" (vii).

Her are some verses from "Flickering Mind" (15-16).

Lord, not you,
it is I who am absent.
At first
belief was a joy I kept in secret,
stealing alone
into sacred places:
a quick glance and away--and back,
circling.
I have long since uttered your name
but now
I elude your presence....
...Not you,
it is I am absent.
You are the stream, the fish, the light,
the pulsing shadow,
you the unchanging presence, in whom all
moves and changes.
How can I focus my flickering, perceive
at the fountain's heart
the sapphire I know is there?

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Thought for the Day

All the glory of greatness has no lustre for people who are in search of understanding.
--Blaise Pascal

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