Separated at Birth?

Now that I’m not an Anglican, I can say these things.

Radovan and Rowan

(Even their names sound similar!)

Methodist joke

Today I heard a funny quip about Methodists: Methodists don’t believe in sex because they are afraid it will lead to dancing.

Experience comic

New novel from Gilead author

Marilynne Robinson, author of the theologically-rich Gilead, has written another novel. Home is a sort of sequel to Gilead. It “takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.” A description and an audio excerpt are available at Macmillan’s web site.

Oh, and feel free to earn me some Amazon credit by ordering the book here.

Hillsong vs. Don Burke

“Man is created not to minister to the gods but to cultivate the earth.”

- Claus Westermann

New Pentecostal Blog

Today a new blog exploring Pentecostalism has been launched. AzuzaRemixed.com
will include contributions from James K.A. Smith, Amos Yong, and Simon Chan. The blog describes itself like this:

When pentecostalism entered its second century it had become the fastest growing expression of the Christian faith and one of the largest. The phenomenon that began in a small mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles has spread from North America to Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America. As a global movement the original sounds of pentecostalism have been remixed and now can be heard through the voices of those from all nations. This blog is dedicated to making those voices heard.

Pray for doubt

“I have always held that my motto, as a teacher, must be, Pray for doubt!"

-- Jane Vella

John Dewey’s 150th Birthday

When John Dewey was alive, his birthdays were always big, national celebrations. Here is an early announcement of an event that looks to be no different.

The Center for Dewey Studies together with The Center for Inquiry is planning John Dewey's 150th Birthday Celebration: An International Conference on Dewey's Impact on America and the World.

Invited Speakers include Nadine Strossen, current President of the American Civil Liberties Union; Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University; and Larry Hickman, Director of the Center for Dewey Studies.

The conference will be held October 22-24, 2009 at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York.

What’s wrong with experience?

Eugene Peterson starts Eat this Book with a spirited critique of experience, envisioning it clashing with the Bible (see below). This seems to be a popular thing to say these days. But I don’t get it. We do not have a choice over whether or not we will employ experience as an “authority for living” – experience simply is. All people, from the pragmatist to the idealists, use experience as an authority.

Of course, what we do with experience– whether we reconstruct it or not – is quite important. Any pragmatist worth his salt will tell you that “pure experience” isn’t worth much to anyone. But that does not invalidate experience, does it?

It will not do to simply create dichotomies between Scripture and self, Bible and experience (like Peterson does below). At least that’s true in my experience.

I want to counter this widespread practice of taking personal experience instead of the Bible as the authority for living. I want to pull the Christian Scriptures back from the margins of the contemporary imagination where they have been so rudely elbowed by their glamorous competitors, and reestablish them at the center as the text for living the Christian life deeply and well. I want to confront and expose this replacement of the authoritative Bible by the authoritative self. I want to place personal experience under the authority of the Bible and not over it. I want to set the Bible before us as the text by which we live our lives, this text that stands in such sturdy contrast to the potpourri of religious psychology, self-development, mystical experimentation, and devotional dilettantism that has come to characterize so much of what takes cover under the umbrella of “spirituality.”

Eugene Peterson, Eat This Book: A Conversation in the Art of Spiritual Reading (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006), 17.

Barth: “Apologetics sucks.”

I’m not about to become a Barthian anytime soon, but this little quote almost persuadeth me:

“Anxiety concerning the victory of the Gospel – that is, Christian Apologetics – is meaningless, because the Gospel is the victory by which the world is overcome… God does not need us.”

Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, p. 35.