When we lose the ability to understand that centaurs and dragons are more real than technology and mechanics, we’re in deep trouble. Impoverished imaginations create unfaith and a loss of meaning, neither of which have anything to do with following in the footsteps of the Crucified and Risen One. An enlightened biblically shaped and Christ focused imagination will be attuned to the interpretive space of dialogue with symbol and story, which eloquently heighten and enrich meaning as an augmentation of reality that is now able to be understood, yet remains inexhaustible – there is always more to be imagined, found out, and discovered.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Thursday, October 27, 2011
The ZigZag Café
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:
Affirming that there is much good, when considering all the horror, suffering, and tragedy in the world, do you find it easier or harder to believe in God?
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
Spiritual Rhythms of Life for Today
When communism collapsed and the Berlin wall fell, there were widespread hopes for a brave new day of freedom and democracy. Cohesion, negotiation, and peace were thought to be the marks of progress, though Europe and the West in general are now losing relevance and credibility. Integration in Europe, for example, has turned into a remarkable question mark that is producing unified centralization and increasing rules and legislation configured by the few to control the many. This no doubt is connected to the looming shadows of the past and its oppressive strategies. But with debt spinning out of control, the system is obliged to reign in freedom and impose its authority. Unfortunately, a Christian voice into our social, economic, and moral problems is absent or so uninformed that it is written off as quickly as the latest joke. If ever there was a time to get our own house in order, it is now. Speaking the truth in love to each other can be a good beginning, but this then has to be lived out and built upon if we are to recapture integrity, renew a realistic hope, and have something valid and viable to say to a world that offers diminishing returns.
Monday, October 24, 2011
Reflection for the Week
Sometimes it seems our lives are going so well – at least no disasters or catastrophes – yet our faith is waning and losing traction. Where’s God and where are we in the story line? The continuity and repetition of daily life appears to go on and on with no resolve, and this can weigh heavily upon us. We want to know where and when it’s all going to come down. But what beginnings there must have been some many, many years ago as God spoke to fill the starry sky and shape a barren earth, and what endings there will be perhaps many, many years from now as God dwells with his people. The story of commencement and ending in the biblical text gives a sense of direction for our lives that in spite of an ongoing now or the cessation of an individual existence, promotes the notion that life as we know it will not continue ad infinitum, but there will be a change – a present and future transformation – that is to be fully realized in the consummation of the coming Kingdom of God, which will bring renewal.
Thursday, October 20, 2011
The ZigZag Café
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:
Why do you think Christians so often read the Bible as a magic book dropped from the heavens – closed eyes, open the Word, and get a verse for the day – and is this a viable reading approach?
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Spiritual Rhythms of Life for Today
Rocked by debt and greed, the Western world as we know it is slowly but surely disintegrating. There is a rising sense, a vibrant pulse if you will that fraud and betrayal are leaving us without direction and hope. Austerity plans are put in place, interest rates are cut, and more money is printed, but little really changes. But where to turn in the midst of the tailspin remains a significant question. Facing large scale and personal moral and economic meltdowns, the viable options seem slim, yet we try this and do a bit of that to no avail, or embrace various forms of fundamentalism, which collapse under the weight of fanaticism. Both relativism and absolutism, however, strip us of reality. To be real is to move away from ourselves and to admit of having a need for another worldly perspective that can be integrated with our own, yet not consumed by it. The Christian depiction of God as Creator and Redeemer could fit this scenario and help revive us, as it offers possibilities for a credible explanation and new understanding of life as we live it.
Monday, October 17, 2011
Reflection for the Week
If we are to find out who we are and what to do, we have to be willing to consider what story we are part of. Being situated in the Christian story of God’s mission to humanity and the world translates into living in Christ like ways – costly love will hopefully begin to shape and identify who we are and what we do. While this being and doing is never perfect, there should be a marked sensitivity towards dispensing grace to the stranger, the weak, the disenfranchised – victims of the economic, religious, and social meltdown of the early twenty-first century. The failure of Christians to recognize what story we are part of will result in our leaving people ungraced and history will not forget our hardness and lack of hospitality during these shattered years, and our selfishness will not go unnoticed and unmarked in the flow of time.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
The ZigZag Café
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:
People who I talk with that say they have found something of true community, and then have to leave it for one reason or another, long for it more and more as the years go by. Why does true community seem to carry so much weight for people nowadays?
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Spiritual Rhythms of Life for Today
Living spirituality comprises a multiplicity of dimensions, which this blog is dedicated to exploring, but one of its central features is action founded on God’s commitment to the flourishing of the world as other than and outside God.
Monday, October 10, 2011
Reflection for the Week
Slick apologetics attempts to offer fast and easy answers to serious questions. If you’ve got a question, SA will make sure to give you an answer. This tactic is most unfortunate, if not deceptive. Driven by the disguise of “having it all together,” this type of apologetic endeavor will ultimately fail to convince, and do more damage than good. People, when they find out the strategy of contrived answers is bogus, being exposed for its lack of integrity, will turn away and go in the opposite direction of the faith that has been so ineffectually defended. There are some questions that simply cannot be answered, which is not to say there are not appropriate answers to honest questions. Apologetics that seeks to have it all is an apologetics without love. Loving apologetics deals with real people and actual life settings, admitting to uncertainties and dilemmas that do not detract from, but enrich the Christian faith.
Thursday, October 6, 2011
The ZigZag Café
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:
Do you think a young earth perspective is a credible interpretation of the early Genesis narrative and the world?
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
Spiritual Rhythms of Life for Today
The living Messiah has inaugurated redemption; something so new and unceasing has burst on the scene through his life, death, and resurrection that we can hardly imagine what it fully entails. One of the striking features embodied in the Messianic life that can be mentioned is that God in Christ, through the power of the Spirit, explosively constrains the present and creatively directs it towards the future. We are, as Christ’s followers therefore, not restricted to the status quo of the cycle of the same, but engaged in and by a radical transformation of grace that finds its destiny in imaging the Crucified and Risen One, beginning in this life and culminating in the next. Let us, with courage and patience, hold fast to the God of redemption, transformation, and destiny.
Monday, October 3, 2011
Reflection for the Week
The failure of the grand narrative of modernity – achieving it all – absolutism, progress, reason, – is shattered. Its replacement is the master narrative of post-modernity – achieving nothing – relativism, consummation, contradiction is not faring much better. The former attempted to construct a unified story for all humanity, while the latter left behind shards, fragments, and sub-plots with no beginning or end. Unfortunately, many Christians have bought into one or the other of these story lines and uncritically woven it into the biblical faith. Moving away from the power schemes of modern or post-modern meta-narratives is an essential task for believers, if we are to be able to present the gospel in a credible and persuasive manner to a world that has lost its way.
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