Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
“Truth for Children,” by Sarah Hammerschlag, in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Autumn/Winter 2018 (VOL. 46, NOS. 3&4).
Sarah Hammerschlag is Associate Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of Religions, and History of Judaism at the University of Chicago
“I believe God loves those moments when we do without him. He thinks, ‘At last, they’re going to stop walking around with their nose up in the air awaiting some supernatural magic; they’re going to watch the snow and the trees and start to think a bit. They’re doing the job without me, inventing utopias that don’t have me as their essence; they are finding within themselves there reason for all things. In fact, without realizing it, they are understanding
……Géza Vermès was a prolific Hungarian Jewish “historical Jesus” scholar and translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls who died on May 8th (see this 1994 interview, Escape and Rescue—An Interview with Géza Vermès, and this eulogy by Hershel Shanks). Vermès’ 1973 Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels was powerfully influential in reintroducing us to Jesus as the greatest in a tradition of charismatic Galilean holy men. The
Part I: The parable of the weeds in the field
Part II: Religion or belief
Part III: Wilderness and cultivation
The parable of the weeds in the field
In a July post on Walhydra’s Porch, I built a story around the troublesome contrast between a new Lutheran pastor’s doctrinally correct sermon and the palpable, all-inclusive embrace of an image of Jesus which spreads its arms over the sanctuary where the sermon
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