We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
ZZ is closed for vacation and will re-open on the 11th of August. I’m looking forward to renewing the conversation and dialogue then. For now – Bonjour.
Finding ourselves in a triumphal procession enhances the reality of both victory and humiliation. This powerful metaphor expresses the fragile tenor of our experience, as we follow in the footsteps of the Crucified and Risen One. Rejection can pierce our souls, and we flounder, weighed down by the woes of the cross, and while our humiliation runs deep and tears us apart, we are not left in utter defeat by those opposed to us, as this is only part of the procession. In the midst of this march, there is also a celebration of victory that will carry us through towards our destiny of resurrection.
Demands for exhaustive truth will continually fail to meet the target. Such illusions are tempting though unfulfilling, and they do a tremendous amount of corporate and personal damage. The sooner we face the truth that there are no meta-narratives, the better. No one has a total explanation of everything, even though at times a person can act as if this is the case. So be it. Illusion peddlers have been around for a while, and are likely to continue to be with us. Conversely, Christians proclaim their freedom from meta-narrative and therefore distance themselves from illusions. In doing so, we rightly let go of attempts to portray a comprehensive story, and embrace a mega-narrative of possibilities for the credibility of the existence of God and his creating and saving action through the Crucified and Risen One in faith.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
What steps do you take if you find yourself doubting that God exists?
Being in community with God and each other is a joy and a privilege. In seeking to do the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way, the apostle Paul urged us to have a deep unity amongst ourselves as we follow Christ, so that we might glorify God with one heart and one voice. To accept each other then, just as Christ has accepted us, will ultimately be pleasing God. Since we are bound together in our various callings, let’s continue to focus on our purpose to serve God wherever we are and in whatever we’re doing. It’s all too easy to lose our way as we face threats and are exposed to the fears of a world spinning off into chaos. God is faithful; therefore do not be faint of heart.
Emerging out of the darkness into the light can be a daunting adventure. Grace and compassion, for example, seem more contrived than anger and malice, while self-constitution reigns over being given a self. We’re plagued by the unreal that appears real and much of the time our awareness level is so low, we can’t fathom anything but the same and obscurity prevails. Yet God has created luminosity, as well as revealing it through the Christ, so that we might have a vision of majesty. Enlightened imaginations heighten the acuity of perception, which begins to enable us to venture out through the illumination to embrace a radiance that glistens with all that’s transformative for good.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Aristotle thinks that, if we are to be just, politics should have an influence and impact on people for good, whereas Kant argues that this is not its role and any political imposition would be detrimental to our freedom. What are your thoughts on the role of politics in matters of justice today?
Living Spirituality, in connection with 2 Corinthians 3, is engaged with the recognition that we have unveiled faces and are new letters written not with ink, but with the Spirit. Thus, as followers of the Crucified and Risen One, we are enabled to be seen as a reflection of the revelation and presence of God, or in other words, indirect reflectors of glory. Unveiled ones are therefore in transformational motion from one degree of reflecting the revelation and presence of God to another, which signifies and symbolizes that we’re becoming more and more the image of what we reflect. This transformation emanates from the Lord, the Spirit, and I would wager it is to encompass the whole of life; the bodily, spiritual, and moral characteristics of human existence.
While it is true that biblical interpretation is always mediate, indirect, a task of seeking sense, as opposed to immediate, direct, or a giveness of complete sense, a text is never entirely semantically autonomous. Texts are author intended entities, not necessarily enclosed within the psychological constraints of the mind, but opened by a literary act, which unfolds a world out into the world, which a reader's world is then able to engage with. An author’s intentions must be considered as pertinent to textual interpretation as it is communicative actions that set the literary genre for and the content of the text. A search for the meaning of biblical texts, therefore, is to be concerned with what the author has accomplished as an action of communication and then how that arrow of sense points the reader towards a meaningful encounter that will refigure life in ontological, epistemological, and ethical matters, to the glory of God.
We will be convening here at the ZigZag café, Suisse, on Thursdays for conversation and dialogue. I invite you to stop by every Thursday for the question of the day. Your thoughts and participation are most welcome. Pull up a stool, avec un café, un thé, ou un chocolat chaud, et un croissant, and join in here on Thursday at the ZZ café.
For today:
Are there any reasons that it would ever be just to torture a terrorist who planted a bomb on an airplane in order to locate and disable it, thereby saving 200 lives?
Forging our way through the roadblocks of condemnation and guilt is a challenge, but transformative and sustainable change is an ever present offer to be embraced. Through the costly giving and the atoning manifestation of the Crucified and Risen One, and the reality of new life we receive as a result of it, we need not be ensnared in that which robs us of being in community with the Living God. As this “in community” is believed and acted upon there is freedom because what stood against us dissipates into the flow of redemptive blood that has significance for now and forever more.
Being responsible and being faithful are crucial elements of the Christian life in witnessing to the Crucified and Risen One. Keeping these essential features in separate compartments or to embrace one over the other is folly. These two characteristics of living spirituality are to complement and re-enforce each other, as we seek to follow Christ, who is life. Testimony nowadays, therefore, has to embody both actions and beliefs, if it is to have traction in the watching world. And when the world watches and merely sees itself in a mirror, the grim reality will be that we have not done our part to present that which is true and credible with integrity.
