Nonaligned faith and practice in the present
!["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
From my Facebook post this morning .
It is quite normal for human beings to claim “religions” as cultural identities. Normal we say “I am a Jew” or “I am a Sikh,” meaning that we belong to people of the Jewish or Sikh culture, those who subscribe not just to the systems of “right belief” and “right behavior” of those “religions.”
All of this is because THE most important social reality for human animals is that they are hardwired
…
Just Us: An American Conversation, by Claudia Rankine (2020)
Excerpts from Ismail Muhammad’s review in The Atlantic
In 2016, African-American poet and scholar Claudia Rankine was not sure that her Yale students “would be able to trace the historical resonances of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant demagoguery.” She wanted them to connect the current treatment of Mexicans and other Hispanic people with America’s 19th century treatment of Irish, Italian, and Asian immigrants.
…It
NOTE: I’ve changed the original title, “The microaggression of calling out microaggression,” to clarify the focus of my concern. It is important to educate people about instances of microaggression “in the moment.” What troubles me are acts of “calling out” I’ve witnessed which return the injury done, rather than inviting collaborative healing.
The microaggression of calling out
At the quarterly business meeting of my Quaker Yearly Meeting (regional association of Quaker Meetings), I kept stumbling over my own
…In a recent post on Quaker Pagan Reflections, the blog he shares with his helpmate Cat, Peter Bishop of Mt. Toby (MA) Friends Meeting has given me a phrase which I believe speaks to the heart of Quaker faith and practice.
Peter writes about “how difficult it is to express in words what worshiping in silence means to us,” even across the perceived barriers within Quakerism itself:
…I see [some] Friends…using Christian
God has not cared that we should anywhere have assurance of His very words;
and that not merely perhaps, because of the tendency in His children to word-worship, false logic, and corruption of truth,
but because He would not have them oppressed by words,
seeing that words, being human, therefore but partially
…I want to introduce my readers to an interesting and useful blog called God Didn’t Say That: Bible Translations and Mistranslations, by Joel M. Hoffman.
This is a resource which I’m just beginning to explore, yet it clearly addresses a core concern of mine: the complications for faith and practice created by incorrect or careless or ideological or overly simplistic translations of sacred texts.
Here’s the opening of the latest post:
…I think John
Two simple metaphors to enrich the meta-conversation about faith and practice across the boundaries of religious language.
In the first, Hystery on Plainly Pagan writes about why she “resists theism”:
…For me, what some might call “God” is that which is both intimately real and even commonplace and wholly Other and Ineffable. If I use the word “God”, people think I mean what I do not mean.
The butterfly is pinned and people think I mean wings and legs
Note: I deleted an earlier version of this post (see comment on “Apology to Quaker Quaker and its host”).
In recent years I’ve been reading and corresponding with a whole spectrum of individual Quaker bloggers, folks who share, in their own posts and in their comments on each other’s posts, an on-going meta-conversation about Quaker faith and practice across the boundaries of religious language.
These Friends write about their efforts to do something highly peculiar: to self-identify as Evangelical
…Within the past few weeks, I have witnessed too many cases of misunderstanding and hurt feelings over language and the unreadiness to listen beyond language.
Overtly, the struggles are framed as being between “non-Christians” and “Christians,” between “secular” and “religious,” between “liberal” and “orthodox.”
They are framed as being over who has been hurtful, disrespectful, hostile or even exclusionary toward whom.
The sad irony is that all of these people are passionate about lifting up loving kinship as the highest
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