Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
There is a grave error in the penitential notion of “mortifying the body.”
It replicates the false dualism of “spirit versus matter ” that crept into and overwhelmed the Jewish faith and practice of Jesus as his followers spread out through the Greco-Roman world.
A truer practice is to “affirm the body,” to affirm it as a mortal yet sacred part of the divine whole.
When I allow myself to suffer the large or small sufferings of my body,
Today I am greatly conflicted about the Quake peace testimony. Not giving it up, but struggling with the horrendous cost in lives entailed in staying true to it.
As of March 7, 2022, the Russian military is surrounding Kyiv, Ukraine, and it continues its deliberate targeting residential neighborhoods and blocking of escape by war refugees. The suffering, death, and destruction are escalating rapidly.
I long to see something done at once to save the people of Ukraine from Russia’s violence.
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“Waiting for Queer Theology,” Mark D. Jordan’s review of Queer Theology: Beyond Apologetics, by Linn Marie Tonstad (Wipf and Stock, 2018), in Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2021.
Queer theologies as processes, not products
The key concern for Mark D.
…![The Tetragrammaton in Paleo-Hebrew (10th century BCE to 135 CE), by Manuela Ideacrea. [Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)]](https://emptypath.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Tetragrammaton_Paleo-Hebrew-940x400.jpg)
“YHWH is the bearer of consequence, not punishment or rewards.”
Excerpts from Dancing in God’s Earthquake: The Coming Transformation of Religion, by Rabbi Arthur Ocean Waskow (Orbis Books, 2020)
Excerpts from “A Jewel in the Lotus: Buddhist chaplaincy includes compassion and ‘skillful means,'” by Chris Berlin, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2020
Chris Berlin, is an instructor in ministry and spiritual counseling and the denominational counselor to Buddhist students at Harvard Divinity School. With his colleague Cheryl Giles, he teaches the course Compassionate Care of the Dying: Buddhist Trainings and Techniques.
…The course interweaves teachings in the Buddhist view of impermanence and death with
Sasha Bley-Vroman reviews Richard Rothstein’s 2017 The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America in the October 2021 issue of Western Friend.
Beginning with the statement, “The GI Bill was a White guy thing,” Bley-Vroman tells us:
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The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (1995)
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Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.
I have
!["Woe unto You, Scribes and Pharisees (Malheur à vous, scribes et pharisiens)," by James Tissot (between 1886 and 1894), Online Collection of Brooklyn Museum [Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons].](https://emptypath.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Brooklyn_Museum_-_Woe_unto_You_Scribes_and_Pharisees_Malheur_a_vous_scribes_et_pharisiens_-_James_Tissot-746x400.jpg)
Some fun with words that may go deeper than we usually expect to go in reading the Gospels.
In Mark’s account of Jesus’ Temple teaching, Jesus answers trick questions from the scholars and Pharisees and then responds with one of his own, translated in English as follows (Mark 12: 35-36):
…How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David? David himself, by the Holy Spirit, declared, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right
!["Frankfurt am Main - African refugees rallying for the right to stay in Germany" [Demo für Bleiberecht, Bahnhofsviertel], by Picturepest on flickr (1/1/2000)](https://emptypath.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Demo-fur-Bleiberecht_1024px-940x400.jpg)
I encourage readers to give full attention to the footnotes. I have used a reference librarian’s “due diligence” to offer relevant background information throughout this article.
It astonishes me sometimes—no, often—how every person I get to know—
everyone, regardless of everything, by which
Walhydra admits rather sheepishly that she was very much in the closet until around 1973.
It was then, while she was in her first year in Lutheran seminary, that she finally realized she couldn’t lie to herself anymore—and, better still, that the Divine One did not in fact condemn her for her “difference,” regardless of what the Church and most of Western civilization had to say.
Finding her courage, she dropped out, moved back to her beloved college town
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