Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Whenever I’m surfing, I keep an eye out for wholesome web content I can pass along to my gentle readers so they too can nurture their delicate sensibilities. When I find unashamed discussions of masturbation, I despair that things have gotten out of hand.
Given the relative scarcity of masturbation in pop culture, it should come as no surprise that masturbation conversation is virtually absent from religious dialogue. Have you ever heard a sermon devoted to masturbation? Have you ever had a discussion group?
With federal elections running both north and south of the 49th parallel, it’s interesting to note differences in these two democratic processes. And never have the differences been so stark.
I tried. I really did. In my continuing quest to plumb the mind of the fundamentalist evangelical Christian (FEC for short), I tried to read Glorious Appearing, the 12th and final installment of the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.
On Sunday July 27th, 2008, Pastor John Mahaffey of the West Highland Baptist Church in Hamilton, ON preached a sermon about the woes of the United Church of Canada. Evidently, he was raised within the UCC…
While in Edinburgh, I visited the Scottish Storytelling Centre and met with its director, Donald Smith, who gave me a tour and, fittingly, recounted something of the Centre’s story.
t seems fitting at today’s convocation that my theology degree should have been conferred on me by Norman Jewison, the director of such movies as Rollerball and Fiddler on the Roof.
Here’s something lame: the theatrical release of a documentary (narrated by Ben Stein) about the tribulations of Intelligent Design proponents.
How could we have been so insightful as to articulate a universal ethic that has stood without revision for more than 2000 years, and yet have failed so miserably when articulating a reasonable theology? Or is it possible that the Golden Rule doesn’t stand on such a sure footing after all?
This is a followup to my earlier post regarding the CDF’s (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith’s) announcement that the Roman Catholic Church is the one true church.
There is a popular perception that we (by “we” I unwittingly reveal my North American/Western bias) live in an increasingly secular society which has no room for religious values.
I finally got around to reading Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer winning second novel, Gilead. I think she will forgive me for taking so long, since she herself has no particular regard for the passage of time. It has been more than twenty odd years since the publication of her first novel, Housekeeping. And the prose itself proceeds in a way that is more aligned with things timeless than with things urgent.
Just days after Benedict issued a motu proprio announcing the return of the Latin mass, the CDF announced that, in effect, the Protestant denominations suffer from a “wound” because they are not the true Church.
We tend to be dismissive of ancient stories. Often these tales use a strange and stilted language and feature characters with odd names, and the stories unfold in formulaic ways that jar with our 21st century sensibilities. Sometimes we see no points of intersection with our life today.
If you had any doubt before, recent Gallup Polls conducted in the U.S. provide ample evidence that knowledge has nothing to do with knowing and an awful lot to do with politics.