I am not going to do a regular review because this was just a single short story. Audible was giving it away a while ago and I just got around to listening to it. This is the story that the movie Total Recall was based on. Like most of Philip K Dick‘s short stories there … Read more
These were the most read reviews. The top read posts were the discussion posts around the Sacred Union, Sacred Passion book. Those were Chapter 1, 2, 3, 3a, 4, 5, 6
For as long as I have been a Christian, I remember being taught, repeatedly, the story of Billy Graham and his attempt to always be above reproach. I have no idea if the stories of the Reverend Graham are true or not but they went something along the lines of: Reverend Graham would not get on an elevator if he’d be on board with a woman alone, that he wouldn’t counsel a woman unless a third party was present, etc.
I never questioned these stories or Reverend Graham’s intent until recently. A dear friend of mine, we’ll call her Molly, came home from college and told me the story of how she couldn’t visit a male friend of hers because his wife wasn’t available to “œtag along”. Molly understood her friend’s feelings but yet she wound up feeling “œicky”; which was quite vexing to her because she did nothing wrong.
Mary Magdalene had a difficult couple of days after her best friend Jesus was crucified. She was numb all over. When she couldn’t stand it any longer she decided she would go to the place her friend was buried and mourn for him there.
She gathered up the spices of her religious custom to ensure that he was properly buried. She arrived at the tomb and found that Jesus’ body was gone. Immediately, Mary loses it. She goes to find a couple of Jesus’ guy friends to help her figure out what happened.
The guys showed up and sure enough Jesus’ body is no longer in the tomb. The guys totally forgot that Jesus’ was going to rise from the dead and they get angry. They looked at each other and said, “OK, it’s on. Let’s get everyone else and find the punk that took Jesus’ body and teach him a lesson.” They totally forgot that Mary was there and just leave her behind as they go to “save the day.”
Mary was not in a good place emotionally. Her good friend Jesus was crucified and when she came back to the tomb to care for him his body was gone. Her friends didn’t really ask how she was doing; they just came up with a plan to right the wrong and left her in the garden alone. After all of the emotion of the last few days she broke down in front of the tomb weeping for the friend she lost…not once, but twice.
Takeaway: This is one of the classics that everyone should read.
Over the past few years there has been renewed interest in Dietrich Bonhoeffer. There is a very good documentary (available for streaming on Netflix). Then two biographies of Bonhoeffer have been published in the last two years (I reviewed Eric Metaxas’s and have now read but have not read the Ferdinand Schlingensiepen biography, which has been much better received in the academic world and I think is a better biography.)
Much of the interest and resources for Bonhoeffer study is a result of a new 16 volume series of Bonhoeffer’s works. Previous, to this series that is published in English by Fortress Press, there were only limited editions of Bonhoeffer’s books that had significant translation issues.
I have purchased three of these volumes (they are not cheap, so many people are still purchasing older editions.) The volume that includes Life Together (Bonhoeffer’s most read book) also includes his book on the Psalms (Prayerbook of the Bible). I am not reviewing Prayerbook of the Bible here, but will later. There is a significant amount of extra material in these books to give context and understanding to these two short books. Life Together is only a bit over 100 pages, but page for page I think is one of the most useful books I have ever read about spiritual growth and the role of community within the church.
The book has only six chapters (Preface, Community, Day Together, Day Alone, Service, and Confession/Communion.)
One of the most useful things that I heard on this reading (I have read this at least twice previously, but not in the last 10 years) was Bonhoeffer’s understanding of the limits and strengths of community. These are two long quotes, but I think shows that Bonhoeffer is not being idealistic about his view of Christian community:
Francis de Sales and Jane Frances de Chantal, Image via Wikipedia
Note: Due to a mis-communication, there were two posts for chapter 3. Here is the second version.
So I am going to start out by stating my own personal opinion and go from there. I truly do believe it is possible for a friendship to happen between males and females. We start out as kids and maybe your best friend growing up is the boy next door. Then somewhere in junior high and high school, you start thinking about cute boys and he is thinking about hot girls. It goes to show that as kids we have a certain maturity we tend to lose as we get older and trends get sexualized.
In chapter 3, it starts out comparing our segregation of sexes to the segregation of blacks and whites. History shows us that cross-gendered and cross-raced friendships have not been popular. But in a day were sex is everywhere you turn, can you really assume a man and woman eating lunch together really are just eating lunch? There is nothing else more?
It is hard to review a book on worldliness. Not nearly as hard as writing one, but still hard. The tension is viewing worldliness as not anti-world, viewing holiness as a worthy goal, a desire to avoid legalism, the need to focus on the grace of Christ and the tendency to focus on a fairly narrow set of outward sins makes for a book on worldliness easy to take shots at.
I did not realized when I started this book that it was a series of essays by different authors rather than a complete work by Mahaney. And that makes a difference. What I liked so much about Mahaney’s book Humility (my review) was that it was so tightly pastoral. And that seems to be a bit missing in some of the essays. It also seems like it might be oriented toward young Christians. After all the chapters are about media, music, consumerism and how to dress right. (The chapter, my Mahaney, on dress really was inappropriate, it should not have been in the book and the focus seemed to be blaming women for being attractive. Guys can lust if a woman is in a Burka. The sin is the lust. The women are the victim of the sin, not the perpetrators. Yes, women can be immodest. Yes, that is a sin, but having a chapter about modesty without talking about the sin of lust means that you are picking on women without dealing with the root issue. After all if Adam and Eve were naked, without either shame or lust, then lack of clothing is not the issue. Unfortunately, the long section on immodest wedding dresses really crossed the line for me.)
I like fixed hour prayer. I think more Christians should participate in it. But I am far from a regular user of it. I am a nanny for my two nieces and having a 3 and 2 year old running around the house 8 to 12 hours a day makes fixed hour prayer difficult.
So I viewed Lent as a time to try to get back on track again. It did not really happen during Lent either. I was definitely an occasional rather than regular user of this book.
But I do love the prayers and choices that Tickle uses. No prayer book is perfect and there are always some things that I would not choose. But I think the variety and choices of prayers and scriptures I would not choose is on of the benefits.
In October 1939, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made a speech in which he famously likened Russia to a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, and then pondered over the likely key to understanding that country’s motivations. In Chapter 4 of Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions, Dan Brennan’s argument changes gear. It is as if he is approaching open country after having had to negotiate the civic roadblocks and pot-holes that Freud, Hollywood and an overly cautious evangelical approach have put in the way of a frank discussion of relations between the sexes. Or to follow Churchill, Brennan at last feels comfortable enough to suggest a key which might unlock the mysterious compulsion that exists within human beings to encounter or know (in all its rich shades of meaning) the opposite sex. That key, in Brennan’s own words, “˜a rich relational and theological concept’, is union. By union or oneness, he appears to mean a spiritual progression for humans in their relationships towards embodying the unity experienced by the Triune God.
Knowing that he is opening up a huge field for discussion, Brennan focuses on theology and scriptural interpretation to ground his arguments. He comes up with twelve reasons (if this seems dry, the reality is different) why the concept of sacred union should impact upon our understanding of gender relations. The Genesis story describes man and woman as made in the image of God, and their human spirituality and sexuality as “˜very good’. The new order in Christ ushers in new social possibilities in all relationships, and the brother-sister metaphor used by Paul sanctions healthy intimacy. Furthermore, the metaphors employed by Paul in his letters for the close solidarity of the Church are not segregated by sex, nor are the “˜one anothers’ of welcome, prayer, holy greeting and confession. Marriage is a human, rather than heavenly sacrament and points to a transcendental union. And attachment in friendship can be stronger than some familial bonds. The “˜breathtaking beauty’ of triune love celebrates the difference of persons, and if the role of women has historically been undervalued, it is still possible to uncover examples of female spiritual leadership in the Old and New Testaments, and most importantly there are feminine metaphors, as well as masculine, for God in Scripture. Lastly, there is the example of Jesus, whose close friendships with women prefigure the possibility of intimate but non-sexual association.
Chapter 3 has three basic points as there is a shift in the book to a more positive description from a reactive teaching model.
I think the first point is the weakest and least helpful. The chapter opens with a description of the changes in social understanding of inter-racial marriage. This is interesting and I have just finished reading about the same thing in the book Committed. Committed, I think actually makes the argument of the changes better. When the Supreme Court decided Loving vs Virgina, overturning the Virginia ruling and allowed inter-racial marriage, 70% of the US disagreed with the ruling. But just a generation later, you will be hard pressed to find anyone that would say that inter-racial marriage should be prevented by law.
But the argument by really does not make a difference because friendship is not marriage and race is not gender. Yes, social conventions change. But the church, nor sin, is bound by societal convention.
Takeaway: This is one of the classics that everyone should read.
Takeaway: We should pay attention to sin and spend time thinking about whether we are focusing more on loving the world or loving God.
