Archive for July, 2008

The Ambivangelical

July 24, 2008 at 1:32 pm · Filed under ambivangelical, church, conversation, epiphany, evangelical, gospel, grace, hypocrisy, illusion, mythmaking, panentheism, physics, postmodern spirituality, spirituality, the bible, tradition

The kind of conversation I like is one in which you are prepared to emerge a slightly different person.
[Theodore Zeldin]

He said to them, “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation.” [Mark 16:15]

I became an adult under the influence of evangelical Christianity. Quite willingly – it was my idea, or at least my assent to someone else’s idea, and it was based on a primal epiphany. And as I re-evaluate my life and my choices, as we all should do, I see good and bad in what I took on.

The key tenants of the church culture I made mine, were those of the evangelical. To quote Wikipedia,

Evangelicalism is a theological perspective, most closely associated with Protestant Christianity, which identifies with the gospel … most adherents consider belief in the need for personal conversion, some expression of the gospel through evangelism, a high regard for Biblical authority, and an emphasis on the death and resurrection of Jesus to be key characteristics.

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A Chernobyl Meditation

July 4, 2008 at 12:10 pm · Filed under apocalypse, consumption, danger, evolution, faith, hell, hope, icons, idols, imagination, jesus, materialism, maya, postmodern spirituality, stewardship, thin places, worth ·Tagged , , ,

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I’m a-goin’ back out ‘fore the rain starts a-fallin’,
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
… Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
… Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
… And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard,
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall.
 [Bob Dylan : A Hard Rains a'gonna fall]

The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water— the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter. [Revelations 8:10, 11]

We cannot say how the wind blows. From whence, towards where, how strongly, how varied, bearing good or ill omen. The wind remains, even in this proud scientific age, a profound mystery.

And so it is that the fateful events of April 1986 have been blown into my ambit. I have been reminded of something that is part of the wallpaper of the 20th century, something I saw from afar, the implications of which I clearly did not grasp at the time. I am in the grip of this tale of horror, and feel compelled to make some sense of it. Read the rest of this entry »

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