textweek

Journey with Jesus - Advent 3

Check out Dan Clendenin's Journey with Jesus for this week. Dan writes about Mary, Ambrose and Basil and the bias of God's heart.

"Helping the homeless and parsing corporate compensation are complex issues; I can't pretend to know much about either. People with good intentions take widely divergent positions on how we should respond to poor people and rich corporations; but whether one should engage these matters is, for the Christian, beyond dispute. As I read the Scriptures for this week, God looks and feels biased. He seems to take sides, and not just about wealth. These Biblical texts are so uncompromising that it is tempting to "spiritualize" them in order to soften them. Instead, I think we should take them at face value as a declaration that the advent of God's kingdom subverts our ordinary ways of doing political and socio-economic business."

"Our Endangered Values"

Check out the NPR Fresh Air interview with Jimmy Carter about his new book, Our Endangered Values. I'm in the middle of reading the book, and really finding it interesting and helpful for raising issues of church & state, text & interpretation (who has the right to interpret), etc. I can see some church groups studying this book together!

bloomingcactus - Advent 3

Check out Todd Weir's bloomingcactus this week for an interesting discussion of the "light" in terms of Jungian psychology.

"Much of the pain and suffering around us comes from people imagining that they are the light themselves.  In psychological terms, my mind turns to Carl Jung when thinking about light and darkness within us.  Jung warned of the dangers of trying to live only in our light.  The shadow within is dangerous when ignored.  Jung believed that the things that we repress that we don’t want to know about ourselves create this shadow within us.  In our attempt to be “children of light” we often repress and try to hide from our greed, selfishness, hostility, grandiosity and pain.  We push these things from our conscious selves, but they rise up from our unconscious and control us."

Lectionary Collage

A new resource recommended to me this week is begodshelper.com. Eugene Stutzman and David Ryan are creating a collage and personal growth guide for each week's set of readings. Mr. Stutzman and Mr. Ryan are members of Covenant Mennonite Fellowship of Sarasota, Florida. It's definitely worth a look to pull us out of looking at the texts primarily through more text/words!