David Williams

We sat on the T, hot and tired after a morning wandering the streets of Cambridge and the ivy-Hogwarts glory of Hahvahd's campus. It was the final day of an all-too-short vacation. It being public transportation, the public was present, a sampling of the Boston streetscape.

One of the more challenging things I face as I try to present my historical-critical-mystical perspective on scripture to others is explaining pseudonymous texts. For pointed example, only seven of the texts in the Bible that are purportedly written by the Apostle Paul are likely to have been written by him.

I talked with her face-to-face a handful of times, not enough to really get to know her. Through the latticework of interconnection that shapes a town, there were others in our congregation who did know her.

One of the most striking features of our degraded public dialogue is our tendency to "double down." When confronted with a failing, or challenged because our assertions seem to have no connection with reality, we don't pause to consider whether we might need to modify our position. That would be a sign of weakness, or so we're told.

Oh, I don't believe that title. It's clickbait. I admit it. Mea culpa. Justice matters, deeply and significantly, for anyone who cares about what Jesus taught or about the explicitly stated intent of Torah. It's just that ... well ... social justice does not provide the teleological framework that integrates me existentially. 

"It's all about the process," I hear, over and over again, from my oldline comrades. This is a familiar refrain amongst us Presbyterians in particular, from pretty much every corner of the fading denominational churches.

As my sweet little church joins me in a Lenten journey through the history, meaning, and purpose of evangelism, I found myself with a peculiar thought in my head. Being a part of a church is a relationship, much like the kind of relationship you have with another soul.

There's a saying that's come to have popular acceptance in American faith discourse: my faith is between me and God. We've been hearing a bunch of that lately, particularly from those seeking power, who bristle at the idea that anyone has a right to call their assertions of faith into question.

I'd stopped at the big box electronics emporium for a gift, and as I browsed, something caught my eye. It was a demo headset, a virtual reality jobbie, one designed to take one of the giant Android slab-phones and turn it into an immersive 3D experience.

It was a silly video, really, just a little bit of feel good fluff that drifted into my social media filter-feeding.

It was a blog post from a wise soul that struck me, if only because it struck so close to home. The idea behind it: that folks who are looking to serve Jesus should be willing to get themselves out of their localized comfort zone, and travel to wherever it is that God is calling them. It was also a message to congregations, calling them to break out of their desire to take the easiest path, choosing those who they know and are in relationship with, rather than making the more difficult call to reach out to an unknown.

There's been a small flutter of conversation recently about a professor at Wheaton College, one who showed solidarity with America's increasingly nervous Muslim population by wearing a head covering, and asserting that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

There's a common thread out there, a thought that gets passed along like a little nugget of meme-profundity. You must live in the now.

God is a metaphor. Or so goes a particular line of thought, as it struggles to make the idea of God meaningful. 

Ashley Madison was evil.

...

Every week or so, I google and #hashtag-search my way through the collective consciousness of our species, looking for new writings/ findings/research into multiverse cosmology. Ever since writing my little tome on how this new theory of everything plays with my faith, I've kept up with where things are going on that front and where things are trending. It's good to keep track of all the pertinent datapoints, which I file away neatly on Facebook for future reference. There's a peculiar thread that runs through the more recent writing on the subject. It feels like, for lack of a better word, despair.

There it's been, resurfacing over the last couple of weeks. First, in a conversation with the pastor of the church where I grew up, as we sat and caught up about life and faith. "How does that play against process theology?" he asked, as I recounted my reflections on the nexus between faith and the multiverse.

I'd never planned on growing flowers. Oh, I think flower gardens are a lovely way to spend one's time. They add a little beauty to our world, and make for a wonderful visiting place for our beleaguered pollinators. I can see the delight in that. But that's not my goal, as I plant.