Is the celebration of the national holiday called Thanksgiving a time of reflection and thanksgiving or merely the sound of the starting pistol in the race for buying stuff? The answers to this question vary and will be wide ranging. For some these days will be very difficult. I received news early on Thanksgiving Day that a friend’s husband had unexpectedly passed away earlier that morning. The season will be difficult for the family even though they are believers. A few days earlier a friend of my daughter and son-in-law was rushed to the hospital with a heart attack. He is about 40 and to the best of our knowledge, not a believer. We do not know yet if he will survive.

For some the holiday is one of a series of firsts. My mother passed away this year, as did Joy’s older brother and my sister’s husband. For us and other members of our families, this was the first Thanksgiving without someone who was special to us. For those of us who are believers and whose family members whom have passed from this life were believers, we have our feet firmly planted both in the present and the future. While we grieve we recognize that our current feeling of loss is temporary and for that we are thankful. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18: Continue reading …

Current Events news often offers lots of stories and ideas we can write about to offer our opinion or even ask if there is a spiritual element. At times we receive funny and interesting responses. Several years ago, when I was pastoring a small church in Lombard, IL we had a weekly column in the area newspaper. In one of them Joy and I wrote on the age of, what we call, the “cry baby boomers.” A generation that seems to view itself as victims and cries that they are being picked on. The day the column appeared a woman who read it called and left a message which started out something like, “don’t know how old you are but why do all of you old people keep picking on us?” and then she went on to describe how I had further victimized her with the article. As Joy and listened to the message, Joy smiled and said, “She is just proving our point.” I called her and we talked for a bit. She was surprised to discover that I was actually a little younger than she was and she chuckled when I pointed out that her call was an example of what we had been saying. Continue reading …

I was talking with my partner in crime, Jonathon Miles, about this week’s blog and he mentioned a quote that C.S. Lewis had made about having first things first. In my trolling the Internet in search of the quote I stumbled across something that combined the quote with issues of social justice at, of all places, First Things.

Over on Catholic World News, a fellow who goes by the name of Uncle Di reflects on the way that clerics in recent decades have abandoned revealed truth and saving souls in favor of sundry causes of social justice. He recalls a 1942 essay by C.S. Lewis, “First and Second Things.” Lewis wrote: “To sacrifice the greater good for the less and then not to get the lesser good after all–that is the surprising folly. . . Every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made. Apparently the world is made that way. If Esau really got his pottage in return for his birthright, then Esau was a lucky exception. You can’t get second things by putting them first; you can get second things only by putting first things first.”

Ultimately, that is the dilemma Continue reading …

Just for fun, let’s put Crossan’s method to work on Mark Twain’s book, Huckleberry Finn. If we merely read the book at face value, we will easily understand that it is the story of a boy that floats down the Mississippi River on a raft with a runaway slave named Jim. But once Crossan illumines Twain’s book with his postmodernist “searchlights,” Huckleberry Finn becomes the tale of a Japanese automaker who goes on an African Safari. Which story line would you think the author intended? The one that comes by a plain reading, or the convoluted, deconstructed one that comes out of an overactive imagination? If you believe the “Safari tale,” it certainly wouldn’t be Mark Twain’s fault, but your own, for putting some other person’s interpretation above the book itself. We might shorten it up a bit and call it a “fari tale.” “Fari tales” are for children . . . adults should just read the book for themselves.

The above quote comes from our 1998 MCOI Journal article The Hysterical Search for the Historical Jesus and is a tongue-in-cheek attempt at demonstrating the need to read literature in its historical grammatical context. John Dominic Crossan Continue reading …

Many of us are somewhat disconnected from history. The recently released Report: Student don’t know much about U.S. history is but one example.

“Just 13 percent of high school seniors who took the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, called the Nation’s Report Card, showed a solid grasp of the subject.”

The study revealed that most students couldn’t identify Martin Luther King Jr or Abraham Lincoln and couldn’t say why they are important. Being somewhat a student of history I can say, I am not overly surprised. Since the 1930s Continue reading …

Ah, spring is in full swing. Flowers are in bloom, the trees have leaves, lawns are in full growth and, the dreaded mosquito is on the scene. Even as I thought about this last week, Joy and I were listening to an audio book while on our route to and from California. The book, A Rule Against Murder: A Chief Inspector Gamache Novel by Louise Penny . It is a well done murder mystery set in Canada, at a large log built resort building in the woods by a lake with no internet. What does that have to do with mosquitoes? Well, everything. With the wonderful setting also comes Continue reading …

The early 20th century’s Social Gospel was a cocktail of ideas achieved through the blending of Enlightenment philosophy and Socinian theology. The Enlightenment had promised an egalitarian society founded on human reason. The post-Reformation heresy known as Socinianism had proclaimed a human-centered salvation, also founded on reason. Together they proved to be a potent tonic for the relief of liberal anxiety over society’s huddled masses yearning to breathe free.

But not everyone was drinking it. Continue reading …