We've heard a lot about Social Justice lately. When used in a positive way, it is often connected with the move toward public recognition and equal treatment for historically disenfranchised peoples, including Blacks, Latinx, and Queer persons. When used in a negative way, Social Justice is portrayed as a kind of Leftist "trojan horse" to inflict good hearted people with guilt and shame and even debt because of historic policies and events they had nothing directly to do with. So, is "social justice" just some kind of newly devised left-wing catch phrase designed to browbeat Americans into policies which are at odds with the foundational principles of our civilization?
Theology, Ethics, and Spirituality centered on the Trinity and Incarnation, experienced through Theosis, in Sacramental Life, leading to Apokatastasis, explored in maximally inclusive ways. And other random stuff.
2020-09-01
2020-08-31
2020-08-27
Hope in a Hollow Culture
“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless!” (Ecclesiastes 1.2)
It is easy to lose Hope in a counterfeit Consumer Culture like ours. Outwardly, we appear to have every resource and luxury, but inwardly so many of us are hollow and empty...
2020-08-16
A Squandered Jubilee
It seems God has given us what could be a Jubilee year. But we are squandering it.
“You will make the fiftieth year holy, proclaiming freedom throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It will be a Jubilee year for you: each of you must return to your family property and to your extended family. The fiftieth year will be a Jubilee year for you. Do not plant, do not harvest the secondary growth, and do not gather from the freely growing vines... The land will give its fruit so that you can eat your fill and live securely on it... The LORD says: The land must not be permanently sold because the land is mine. You are just immigrants and foreign guests of mine.” (Leviticus 25:10–11, 19, 23)
2020-08-06
Sam Harris’ Monstrous Moral Landscape
I recently picked up Michael Brooks’ book about the “Intellectual Dark Web” in which he critiques the views of several “renegade” intellectuals, including the famous secular crusader Sam Harris. This was one of those instances where I was reminded of something I intended to write, but never got around to. In particular, around 2013 I read through Harris’ 2010 book entitled “The Moral Landscape”. In it, Harris advocates the idea that Moral Values can be derived from empirical observation alone. While this thesis is problematic on its own, what makes it especially problematic for Harris is an incendiary moral claim that he made six years prior in an earlier book:
2020-08-02
A Mediation on James Three
An intimate gift
A holy gift
From the Word
Through the words
By our words
We are invited
To climb into someone else’s soul
To think their thoughts alongside them
To see through their eyes
To feel with their heart
To imagine their imaginations
And dream their dreams
Such is the sacred power of words.
.
And yet we live in World
Deaf to words
And blind to the Word
Because we spew words frantically and frenetically
We fire them like bullets to slay our enemies
We use words to lure and trap and ensnare
We prostitute our words
We whore them out for power and praise
We use them to manipulate and infiltrate
And desecrate
The Temple of the Soul
Using our many many many words
For anything
For everything
Except communication and communion
Our use of words is to the Gift of the Word
What pornography is to the Marriage Bed.
.
Words are a gift
Words are a weapon
Words are a tool
Words are a lure
Words can be signposts
Pointing to the creative Word of Love and Light
Or they can be directions
Leading us to the depths of Hell
So take care how you use them.
.
A poem on the occasion
Of my 500th post to this blog
May my words be part of the solution
And not part of the problem
2020-07-25
28 Summers
28 summers ago I fell in love with Jesus
Not all at once
But a growing awareness
Starting with a desperate deal
Heal my life Jesus!
And I will live that life for you!
Little did I know what that would entail
But Jesus was faithful when I was faithless
And so unfolding over several months
This new love became real
Until one late night
On a Christmas break
At a Taco Bell
I knew I belonged to Jesus
Deep down in my gut
And it wasn’t just bean and cheese tacos talking.
2020-07-13
Christ and the Cosmos: A Review and Proposal for Trinitarianism
Recently I finished reading "Christ and the Cosmos: A Reformulation of Trinitarian Doctrine" by Keith Ward. It is a stunning and masterful restatement of the idea of the Trinity in light of the findings of modern science and the philosophy of personal idealism. In it, he lays out a powerful case for why the Trinity should be conceived as three Intersubjective Relations within One Divine Self, rather than as three Independent Persons in a Community of Three Divine Selves. I have written before about the difference between this "One Self" or "One Consciousness" view of the Trinity versus a "Three Self" or "Three Consciousness" view of the Trinity.
2020-07-01
Social Collapse and Divine Judgment
The LORD says: Are you not like the Ethiopians to me, O children of Israel? Did I not bring Israel up from the land of Egypt, and the Philistines from Caphtor and the Arameans from Kir? (Amos 9:7)
The history of Israel is given as a Pattern of how God works with all people groups through all time. From the oppression and enslavement that led to the liberation of God’s people in the the Exodus, to the idolatry and injustice that led to the discipline of God’s people in the Exile: It reveals the Pattern God follows in dealing with peoples and nations. What God has done in the history of Israel, God has also done in the history of the Ethiopians and the Egyptians and the Philistines and the Arameans. And what God has done in those nations, God also does in all other nations and peoples and cultures.
Here's how that works out...
2020-06-30
A Provocation on Irony and Cynicism
Novelist David Foster Wallace once observed: “Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage.” From newscaster comedians to blockbuster movies to social media, we are drenched in irony and sarcasm and cynicism that pretends to complain about the way things are. But secretly many don’t want to change anything about it. They get too much profit and popularity from the dysfunctional and destructive system we live in. Irony has become the song of the caged bird who is secretly scared to death of leaving its cage. Irony is merely ersatz resistance: It makes us feel like we are rejecting the system and rebelling against injustice, when in fact constant irony imprisons our imaginations to “what is possible” and adjusts our behavior to the “the way things are”. Using irony, we complain as we obey. But we still obey nonetheless. And when irony and cynicism become orthodoxy, then sincerity and hope become subversion of what is “realistic”. So let’s really become realists and demand the impossible with sincerity and hope.
2020-06-29
Flawed Biblical Heroes and Racist Monuments
Recently the WSJ published a deeply flawed argument for keeping racist monuments in public spaces. Basically, the argument is that since churches celebrate flawed saints, then public land should be used to celebrate racist heroes of a racist rebel cause (and if we don't, we are forsaking our "history"). Some points of contradiction:
2020-06-25
Remember This
A reminder for myself.
Maybe it will help you too.
Be compassionate to everyone,
For we are all struggling
In ways that are not apparent to others.
Most of us are far better
Than our worst ideas and ideals,
And we are far worse
Than our best ideas and ideals.
None of us is perfect
None of us is whole
All of us rely on a Grace
Bigger than our worst failures
Better than our greatest hopes
To heal us and make us whole.
So may we strive
To be embodiments of that Divine Grace
To one another.
2020-06-11
Privatize Racist Monuments: A Modest Proposal
In the wake of the George Floyd protests, we are seeing protesters around the world, from every tribe and tongue, rise up and dismantle monuments to human oppression. Monuments to slave holders are being defaced and beheaded, toppled onto the ground, and thrown into the water. Just as we cheered when the Berlin Wall came down, and when statues of Fascists and Dictators around the world have been torn down, so now people are cheering the forcible removal of racist monuments from public lands. What should we do about this?
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This is a bunch of incoherent babble to make us think hard about our incredible love affair with the God of the universe, our astounding infidelities against God, and God's incredible grace to heal and restore us through Christ. Everything on this site is copyright © 1996-2023 by Nathan L. Bostian so if you use it, please cite me. You can contact me at natebostian [at] gmail [dot] com