October 12, 2009 • 10:23 pm 0
This Saturday night my church, The Wheatland Mission, will be hosting James Bryan (Jim) Smith as he shares about his latest book The Good and Beautiful God. You won’t want to miss this special time as Jim shares about coming to know, love and follow the God that Jesus knows.
Filed under: Apprentice, Good and Beautiful, books
October 5, 2009 • 7:49 pm 0
This week, Tracey (Diaz) Lawrence, will be sharing about her most recent book which she co-authored with Eric Irivuzumugabe. It’s a story of survival, forgiveness and hope after the Rwandan genocide.
Join us at the Wheatland Mission, this Saturday, at 5:30.
Filed under: books, from the profane to the sublime
May 18, 2009 • 10:54 pm 4
Recently I have been reading Dallas Willard’s book The Divine Conspiracy with some friends. It has been refreshing, challenging and a joy. Willard, in his discussion about how anger often sabotages the kingdom heart, reminded me of a great passage by the Franciscan Priest Richard Rohr. Enjoy… tell me what you think… wrestle with this.
“You can take it as a general rule that when you don’t transform your pain you will always transmit it. Zealots and contemporary liberals often have the right conclusion, but their tactics and motives are often filled with self, power, control and the same righteousness that they hate in conservatives. Basically, they want to do something to avoid holding the pain until it transforms them. Because of this too common pattern, I have come to mistrust almost all righteous indignation and moral outrage. In my experience, it is hardly ever from God.
‘Resurrected’ people prayerfully bear witness against injustice and evil—but also agree compassionately to hold thier own complicity in that same evil. It is not over there, it is here. It is our problem, not theirs.The Risen Christ, not accidentally, still carries the wounds in his hands and side.” – from Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of Saint Francis in an Age of Anxiety, pg. 23
April 20, 2009 • 1:27 pm 2
Ken Bailey has been working quietly behind the scenes for many years. Now many of his studies are available to a wider audience. Here are some of his books that are available today: Ken Bailey at Amazon.
Filed under: books
April 17, 2009 • 8:40 am 2
This is a first in a series. I have several “firsts in series” but maybe this one won’t become an orphaned post in the archives of Tangence.
A.N. Wilson has written biographies on many of Christianity’s heavy hitters. People like C.S. Lewis, Tolstoy, the Apostle Paul and Jesus. (The heaviest hitter?) He has been a long time skeptic of faith close to the camp of folk like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins. However, after going through a kind of renaissance in his own faith he has returned to the church.
Here is an article of his where he shares his experience of Palm Sunday: Religion of Hatred by A.N. Wilson.
Also, check out this one: Why I Believe Again
Filed under: books, from the profane to the sublime, pilgrimage
April 11, 2009 • 9:05 pm 4
SEVEN STANZAS OF EASTER
By John Updike
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
From Updike, John. “Telephone Poles and Other Poems” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1961).
Filed under: books, resurrection
January 27, 2009 • 11:18 pm 1
John Updike
One of America’s greatest contemporary writers died today. A novelist, short story writer and poet who was fascinated with faith, American middle class life and all the conflict, mostly unseen, to be found there. Updike was most well known for his novel about an American man trying to make sense of his life and escape it. The novel is Rabbit Run.
He is also famous for his novel The Witches of Eastwick and most recently its sequel, The Widows of Easwick.
One of my favorite poems is his “Seven Stanzas at Easter”. Here are the 4th and 7th.
Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.- from Telephone Poles and Other Poems © 1961 by John Updike.
The International Herald Tribune has a great article on the man. You can read it here: John Updike, lyrical American writer, is dead at 76
Filed under: books, from the profane to the sublime, resurrection
November 13, 2008 • 11:27 pm 0
Kathleen Norris’s book, Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith contains her reflections upon many of the primary themes in the Christian life by examining the words we use to talk about them. She shares the following story from the monks of the Egyptian desert in her brief chapter on angels.
To one of the brethren appeared a devil, transformed into an angel of light, who said to him, “I am the Angel Gabriel, and I have been sent to thee.” But the brother said, “Think again–you must have been sent to somebody else. I haven’t done anything to deserve an angel.” Immediately the devil ceased to appear.
Filed under: books
October 12, 2008 • 8:24 pm 0
Evangelism, rightly understood, is the proclamation of the Gospel or “good news” of Jesus Christ. The Gospel, rightly proclaimed, is the announcement that Jesus is the Lord over all creation, the entire Cosmos, and even death itself. This “good news” has the result, for those who receive it, of entrance into God’s family, participation in his Kingdom, and forgiveness of sin. This is known as salvation. Read the rest of this entry »
Filed under: Bonhoeffer, books , Bonhoeffer, Life Together
October 2, 2008 • 8:51 pm 0
“Only he who lives by the forgiveness of his sin in Jesus Christ will rightly think little of himself. he will know that his own wisdom reached the end of its tether when Jesus forgave him.” (pg. 95)
Filed under: books , Bonhoeffer, Life Together
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