Few arguments are as engaging as humour; perhaps you’ve already seen Maggi Dawn’s top ten reasons why men shouldn’t be ordained. Of course, as an anabaptist, I don’t think anyone should be ordained.
Entries from October 2008
October 29, 2008
If anybody do go to heaven, they will
There’s a delightful scene in Thomas Hardy’s nineteenth century novel, Far from the madding crowd, the funniest one in the entire novel, where some of the farm workers sitting in the pub get to discussing religion, just as Joseph Poorgrass is meant to be delivering Fanny’s coffin to the cemetery. The ‘chapel-goers’ they talk about [...]
October 29, 2008
If you have been left behind
In my journey out of fundamentalism over the last ten years, I started off being angry at it. I wanted to argue with every fundamentalist, to show them why they were wrong. Then I went through a period of morbid fascination and I started scrapbooks of outlandish examples of fundamentalist literature (pamphlets, tracts, posters) that [...]
October 23, 2008
Acedia: why I can’t make my bed
In Christian Century magazine, I came across an extract from Kathleen Norris’s new book, Acedia and me : a marriage, monks and a writer’s life. I had to look up acedia. It means spiritual sloth.
Her take on acedia is that it is a failure to find meaning in the ordinary, repetitious daily tasks and experiences [...]
October 14, 2008
Mutual love and submission in marriage
I.H. Marshall’s article ‘Mutual love and submission in marriage: Colossians 3:18-19 and Ephesians 5:21-23′ appears in the excellent collection Discovering biblical equality : complementarity without hierarchy (Apollos: 2004). His article is a good argument for why these passages do not call for male headship today.
Col. 3:18-19: ‘Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in [...]
October 8, 2008
Death: the face of God’s enemy
Also in the latest issue of On the Road, Chris Marshall reviews David Bentley Hart’s Doors of the Sea : where was God in the tsunami? I want to read this book because his account of evil and God’s sovereignty resonates me. Marshall finishes the review with this, a paragraph of comfort to me:
The book… [...]
October 8, 2008
Staying put: vow of stability
Some interesting things in the new issue of On the Road, the journal of the Anabaptist Association of Australia and New Zealand.
In a lengthy article, Mark Hurst explores the common threads of Anabaptism and New Monasticism. He quotes at length from Schlabach’s essay “The vow of stability : a premodern way through a hypermodern [...]
