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I smell John the Baptist
John the Baptist is an acquired taste, like roquefort. He’s complex. He is an amalgamation of unanswered questions: Is he a zealot acting out the Exodus as a kind of political comedy sketch? Is he the leader of a rival faith community, a serious threat to the fledgeling Jesus movement? Is he a kind of Enkidu figure—a fugitive of our collective consciousness from the epic Gilgamesh—who crawls out of the wilderness, learns our ways well enough and then attempts to wrestle and pin our society to the ground, only to be admired briefly and then destroyed?
Whatever John is, he’s not easy to put on a cracker.
Links? Links.
Here are some things I read recently but didn't get around to blogging about: the austerity crisis and the press corps' bias toward fairness, a new kind of milk truck, more.
The 10th annual attempt to undermine Christianity at Christmas
Liberty Counsel and the American Family Associationhave posted their Tenth Annual “Naughty and Nice” list, encouraging Christians to shop at stores that wish them a Merry Christmas rather than a mere “Happy Holidays.”
Am I the only one who remembers a time, not so long ago, when Christians thought that their goal should be to bring the Christian message to those who needed to hear it, and not merely to surround themselves with other Christians to exchange Christian greetings with one another?
I didn’t think so.
Life of Pi, love of God
A boy, the son of a zookeeper, grows up in picturesque Pondicherry, India. He is bright and inquisitive and unusually attuned to the world around him. He is, by place of birth, a Hindu, and a devout one. He discovers Christianity (“Thank you, Vishnu, for introducing me to Christ”), and then finds the religion of Allah, especially its profound witness to the practice of daily prayer, to be life-giving.
His parents are perplexed.
Monday digest
New today from the Century: Jerome Baggett reviews Robert Wuthnow, Debra Dean Murphy on Life of Pi, more.
How we talk about God
According to Robert Wuthnow, well-educated Americans have reconfigured their religious language in terms of reasonableness—and thus retained a place for the supernatural in everyday life.
Heading out east
My wife and I are about to leave for two weeks on the east coast, where we'll see old friends, meet new babies, work a little (her mostly) and hopefully relax a lot....
A role for everyone: Casting the Christmas pageant
You are about to enjoy a Christmas pageant in your congregation. Congratulations, and be sure to plan accordingly.
Former rector of nation's largest Episcopal church becomes a Catholic
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (RNS) The former rector of the nation's largest Episcopal church has become a Roman Catholic....
'Fifty Shades of Grey' moves evangelicals beyond black and white sexuality
Ask Kelley Taylor, a Southern Baptist college student, if she's opened the steamy pages of "Fifty Shades of Grey," and she has a ready response....
My one and only gamble
I did something totally irrational the other day, something that goes against my principles. I bought two Powerball tickets.
I knew the chances of winning were one in 175,223,510. The odds of becoming a movie star are better. But someone is going to have to win this thing eventually, I reasoned, and it might as well be me.
On NYU's replyallcalypse
This is a pretty ridiculous story:
It is the nightmare that virtually all email users dread: accidentally hitting "Reply All".
This week, one student at New York University took the all-too-simple error to the next level, when he inadvertently discovered a bug in the school email system that allowed anyone to "reply all" to a generic university email, bombarding nearly 40,000 people with his answer.
Friday digest
New today from the Century: Casting the Christmas pageant, year-end picks in fiction for children and youth, more.
Fiction for children & youth
Wonder, by R. J. Palacio. A deformed face and hideous hearing aids mark August Pullman as a freak....
God Is in the Manger, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
This collection of Bonhoeffer’s devotions for Advent, Christmas and Epiphany are drawn from his sermons, letters and other writings, many of them composed in his prison cell prior to his execu...
Fusing justice and holiness: Ministry in the 21st century
"Progressive Christians do a good job with issues like LGBT rights," says Dennis Sanders of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Minneapolis. "But we're less good at helping people become disciples of Jesus."
Vatican blasts media coverage of pope's latest book
VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican on Thursday (Nov....
Catholic intensity fades as evangelical devotion surges
After November's presidential vote, Catholics could cite ample evidence for their renewed political relevance while dispirited evangelicals were left wondering if they are destined to be yesterday'...