Sheelah, I’m glad you liked my ‘poor man’ reflection. It wrote itself reminding me how often I am that ‘poor man’ longing for redemption but afraid to ask.
In the 1990s I put an Episcopal Church bumper sticker on my truck’s rear bumper. In addition to the Church logo, the bumper sticker said: “Share God’s Love Today.” I would forget th…[Read more]

Sheelah, thank you so much for sharing Richard Rohr’s meditation. His quotation from Dante’s Inferno and from Jesus resonated with me, ” By faith you will be saved.” Here at Forgiving Victim I am learning about the gift of faith in the midst of my woundedness. I think my response to this lesson’s Discussion Question reflects a lot of ‘dark wood’,…[Read more]

In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your lives?

Sheelah, thank you for your kind words. I’m getting back to ‘life as usual’ after the stent procedure. ‘Life as usual,’ however, always seems to go off in many different direction…[Read more]

[Here’s the post as I wrote it. Since I can’t remove the redundant post above, perhaps the website manager can do it for me.]

In what ways might Jesus be grieved by your own or your community’s “hardness of heart”?

“Hardness of heart” resonates with me these days. A week ago Dr. Reeder had me “etherized upon a table,” to borrow from T. S. El…[Read more]

I apologize for the length and redundancy of the foregoing post. Obviously, I did something wrong in the ‘copy and paste’ before I clicked the post button. The mechanics of this Discussion Forum feel quite ‘unforgiving’ as I cannot find any means by which I can edit a post once it is submitted.

In what ways might Jesus be grieved by your own or your community’s “hardness of heart”?

“Hardness of heart” resonates with me these days. A week ago Dr. Reeder had me “etherized upon a table,” to borrow from T. S. Eliot http://bit.ly/1Ue7Wq6, so he could snake his cardiologist’s catheter into my coronary arteries to break up the occluding plaque…[Read more]

What ideal of goodness was Dr. King challenging in his I Have a Dream speech?

Eugenics, a pseudo-science that supported racist ideas, was popular in the U.S. from the 1910s to the 1930s. Eugenics supported claims that some races were better than others holding that each race had a right to exist but that races should live separate from each…[Read more]

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an African-American man, aimed his ‘I Have a Dream Speech’ speech at poor, marginalized African-Americans in 1960s America. However, King was speaking to individuals from all races who the dominant, capitalist, socio-economic system had excluded from so many of its benefits.

King’s speech directly challenged white A…[Read more]

Sheelah, what I wrote refers to James’s use of the phrase “function of a purity code” in section six of Essay 7 in the “Forgiving Victim” book I’m reading the ebook version and I find that the pagination varies with the monitor I use. The quote below is somewhere on pages 326-328 in the hardbound copy of the book. James refers in this part of the…[Read more]

Receiving a New Story

St. John’s, our small church where I work part-time as volunteer bookkeeper/Treasurer, completed its annual leadership change a month ago. Leadership changes, even in tiny congregations like ours, can be disruptive. Whether the change is benign or belligerent, each staff member must find the new workplace vision that best…[Read more]

People-watching absorbed much of my time on Washington’s National Mall one sunny spring afternoon recently. Good weather brought out the crowds. As we strolled the promenades, I tried to see persons interacting, not individuals representing groups defined by nationality or race or physical ability or the manner in which they wore their caps or any…[Read more]

Even as God’s love surrounds us, language limits us to temporal and spatial terms to describe heaven and hell. Jesus said to the criminal on the cross next to him: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” (Luke 23:43) Just as we all today are criminals, sinners, we all are free to “be with [Jesus] in Paradise … today.”…[Read more]

Peter dreamt about clean and unclean food, which helped him to a profound, personal understanding “… that God shows no partiality but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him”. Reading about Peter in Acts 10 helped me recognize and integrate the need for a self given by the Other “other” rather than th…[Read more]

How has Peter’s pattern of desire been re-formed? What is he learning about God’s desires for the shape of religious communities?

Acts, Chapter 10 describes Peter’s initial movement towards a new pattern of desire. Peter captured the essence of his new understanding when he said “… God has shown me that I should not call any human common…[Read more]

This section of the course focuses on Acts, Chapter 10 where Peter realizes that God loves all persons equally, regardless of their human condition. Luke illustrates Peter’s profound insight through the metaphor of Peter’s vision of “profane and unclean food.”

Peter’s real intuition was not about food. It was about the offer and extent of God’s…[Read more]

Would you be persuaded to eat Cicada Tacos if I told you that experts say that they are rich in protein, vitamins and minerals, low in fat, and have zero carbs? If not, why not?

I don’t know if I could eat cicada tacos, regardless of whose hands prepared them. I wonder if a food comparison is an apt analogy for Peter’s profound change of hea…[Read more]

3.7 What might a new unity look like?: Receiving a new story
In the Discussion Forum of this unit, share ways in which you have noticed the content, questions or insights from the previous session showing up in your lives.
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Michele Barrett spoke at the London School of Economics…[Read more]

3.6 Induction into a people: Wrap-up
As old forms are undone, Jesus makes possible a “complete recasting of the way humans live together.”
What are the signs that something like this might be happening in your community?
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While ‘a group’ is a commonly used term, a sense of shared community very often eludes gro…[Read more]

Over the years, I have focused intellectually on church hierarchy, buildings, and internal organizational structure. And yet emotionally I’ve experienced an open, loving community through our local parish, which while not always unconditionally loving, keeps on trying.

Father Bob, one of our former rectors, was fond of referring to the church a…[Read more]

I look at the ‘The Procession’ http://bit.ly/1UT66x1 and find all the detail distracting. However, I like the blue shades and the oranges colors. The Romanesque nave in the upper-center draws my eye into the image. Above the nave, the people in the boat make me think of Noah. Altogether, ‘The Procession’ is not one that typically would attract my…[Read more]