We need to distinguish in detail all the different sorts of explaining we do in life. No one key opens every lock. Keith Ward at Comment is Free
Since the dire diagnosis of esophageal cancer a question has arisen over whether to pray for famous atheist, Christopher Hitchens. By Garret Keizer. And it should not have arisen.... Read on >>>>
THE superficial standard of debate in the election campaign so far is demeaning to the voters, with the leaders appearing like puppets or paper cut-outs, Uniting Church of Australia president Alistair Macrae said yesterday.
He urged Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott to spell out their fundamental vision and values to help voters differentiate between them, rather than just "cheap political point-scoring".... Read on in The Age >>>>
Tim Costello: ...Many politicians now believe any rhetoric or policy that ''gets tough on asylum seekers'' will deliver an electoral dividend. Personally, I believe such a link is overstated. Even if it does exist, it is dangerously unpredictable and a difficult issue to control. It is a genie that once released is not easily re-bottled.
Moreover, an election fought on such an issue is likely to tear at the very fabric of Australia's egalitarian psyche and take us back to the very worst of the race debate that fostered the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation....
The irony is that when Australian governments moved to set up overseas processing centres the cost to the taxpayer soars far beyond the costs of housing and processing asylum seekers here... Read on >>>
Sometimes l retreat at here with Jesus would find a nursery place, 
my plants. Some of these are 20
years old, and have travelled with us,
house to house. Someone gave us the
Dracena draco in college. The umbrella
plant was a shoot from the tree
near Laurie's old house. Felicity gave us
the fern when she went back North.
I sit here in the cool shade, with
memories and a small peace.
it seems, and then go back into the world.
Why rewire the church? Church has been at the centre of my identity. It's formed me, frustrated me, deeply angered and hurt me, guided me, and protected me. Some of the most challenging ideas I have ever met, far more radical than the lawn meetings of my student days, have come from the theologians of the church. There has been a sense of connection to the tradition and wisdom of millennia. And, inevitably, the frustration of tradition hide-bound. I remember singing the words of a hymn one Sunday morning, "nothing changes here..." and one of the youth group muttered sotto voce to his girlfriend, "God, you can say that again!" What worked for our parent's church doesn't necessarily work for us. I notice it often doesn't work for them anymore, although older people are sometimes more gracious about their frustrations! Life changes, we change, and constantly need to reassess where we are going.
This little church on the web is modelled around the metaphor of an old and treasured house. It's the house our parents lived in and inherited from someone we never knew. The house is strong and robust, but needs rewiring. Our ways of thinking and being need to change to make the house liveable and practical. Otherwise it will be a burden, not a base camp for life.
Then Wendy said....
I was reading the side piece about why ‘rewire' the church. I thought the analogy was good but I wonder how many people of our (or younger) generations would connect with it. Doing pastoral visiting over the years in all manner of older homes - some that would more clearly need ‘rewiring' - and some renovated houses - leads me to think that most homes in need of rewiring are in need of far more than just the rewiring done!! These days we use our homes very differently to the past - we like bigger more open spaces, bigger windows to give a light filled space etc.Of course, if someone was to buy an old home that was structurally sound and wanted to slowly renovate - rewiring would be a major and first place to start. I would think this was more what the website was trying to do - perhaps recognising that walls and doorways might need to be shifted or knocked down eventually, all in good time. In the meantime, to make the place safe and liveable the rewiring needs to be done.
Current Visitors Online:
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Sites we like
Progressive Involvement
Bill Loader
Exploring our Matrix
Experimental Theology
Real Live Preacher
One Man's Web (Andrew)
Science and Religon News
Science and Religion Today
Religon Dispatches
A Church (re)Wired
Link of the Day: Giving up Hope
Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.
Derrick Jensen is an environmental activist. He goes on to say
A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.
Coming from a tradition that says a lot about hope, these words are a challenge. But read on:
When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they—those in power—cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you’re dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell—you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.
And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you.
This sounds very similar to notions of conversion and resurrection in the now of the now and not yet realm of God.
His article in in Orion Magazine ends with these words, which also resonate with my tradition.
When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.
And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.
In case you’re wondering, that’s a very good thing
Reading Jensen means carefully unpacking what he and the Christian traditon mean by the word "hope." This will repay the effort. Christians who wilfully ignore the threat of global warming because they 'hope in God,' for example, deserve everything he says about them. Hope that is plain denial, or whistling in the dark, or disguised acquiescence to the powers that be, needs to be exposed for the empty and disempowering concept that it is.
His description of the 'costs and benefits' of Grace, which he has called giving up hope, are a better description than that I've heard in many a sermon!... Read on >>>> Archive here
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