The Church is not a purity cult. We try to turn our institutions into purity cultus of behavior or belief all the time. We're really good at it. We've fought wars over our theologies wrapped in nationalism. We've crusaded from west to east all in the name of the purity of the Church. "Ex filio" was a war cry a thousand years ago.
Rachel Held Evans is right. Evangelicalism may very well be losing a generation and by extension, we all are. But then some of us have been losing parts of generations for a long time. Some of the Boomers walked never to return. More of Gen X did the same. Now the enormous generation of Millennials is having its say. Many are voting with their feet. They are tired of the culture wars. They are tired of the purity fights. Many people from various generations are. They are all voting with their feet. The same thing is happening in Catholicism though some are choosing to stay. If it weren't for the influx of Catholic immigrants to the US, we'd see the same statistical free fall in Catholicism that the mainline is experiencing.
No great theological revelations today. No tear-jerking finale. No big mortal lesson. Just another step in a journey of a lifetime. ...
We’ve been in San Francisco the last couple of days, which is one of my favorite cities in the world. Driving here definitely hikes my blood pressure, but the sights, culture and food makes up for it.
Mostly we’ve continued to walk as much as possible. We’ve covered several miles every day, but my feet are evidence of the change of routine. Several blisters have emerged where there should just be calluses, and my plantar fasciitis decided to rejoin me in my heels after a brief, but welcome, sabbatical.
The Rev. Tom Sherrod loathed to "declare" a couple man and wife.
As a stutterer, Sherrod always had problems with hard “c” sounds, and the “c” in “declare” was a doozy. “P” sounds weren’t easy either, and the Bible is full of them.
“If I tried to read, I would lock onto words,” said Sherrod, a North Carolina hospital chaplain who is an ordained United Methodist minister. “I tried to steer clear of certain Scriptures.”
Now, after intensive speech therapy, Sherrod publicly reads aloud whatever parts of the liturgy he likes. But before he learned to control the stutter, life -- as it can be for many stutterers -- was an exhausting exercise in avoiding some tough words and muscling through others.
Today, spend a few minutes resting in silence with God. Turn the volume down, the electronics off, or find a space where you can be free of distractions to rest, wait, listen.
"Jesus put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.’" - Matthew 13:31-32
"Truth has a power of its own... A poem can inspire a movement. A pamphlet can spark a revolution. Civil disobedience can arouse people and provoke us to think." - Howard Zinn
Mitt Romney on Saturday delivered the commencement speech at Liberty University. The Los Angeles Times has video and the full transcript of the speech.
Read full transcript HERE.
For Reuters, Sebastian Moffett reports on a new Human Rights Watch report:
The BBC reports that Caesar Achellam was captured by the Ugandan army on Saturday:
From yesterday's New York Times:
"There is nothing a presidential campaign likes less than to be forced to answer for someone else’s actions. And yet President Obama and Mitt Romney are likely to face that challenge repeatedly during this election season as their allies and adversaries in Congress pursue agendas that do not always make things easy on the campaign trail."
Read the full story here