LiturgicalCredo.com’s Blog

On Sunday morning, which form of worship is more likely to be vulnerable to the insincerity of the presiding minister and which is less likely to subject those in attendance to manipulation:

A liturgy-guided service, or a Pentecostal service?

A creedal, Eucharistic service, or a mega-church service?

Pope Benedict XVI signed a document today that will  relax restrictions on the Latin Mass. The following AP story does not give specific details; that might be because the document that the Pope signed has not yet been published, although it should be in the next few days.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/WireStory?id=3325076&page=1 

So far, apparently, the AP is the only major news organization that has filed a story.

I realize this is not from a new book:

“God does not cease to be a mystery in the event of revelation. The self-revealing God never becomes a controllable object or a manipulable possession.”

From Daniel Migliore’s Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology

“I realized many years ago that the really good periodicals served the purpose of shaping thought over time.

“And living with books, or rather living with wise authors through their books, serves the same purpose, especially if we approach books as things to be savored and revisited, rather than lines on a checklist.”

-Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 85

http://www.marshillaudio.org 

Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great, “must be banking on a readership that has not read Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky. These Christian authors dramatized the themes and stories of the holy book that Hitchens disparages.”

So writes Mary Grabar at TCSDaily.com.

She quotes Hitchens making this paradoxical assessment:

We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.

Grabar makes her full case here:

http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=061507A 

You’ve got to see this YouTube clip:  meet The Formationator.

I’ve added it to the homepage LiturgicalCredo.com; you might have to scroll to the right if you have a narrow screeen. Click http://www.liturgicalcredo.com .

Philip Jenkins has an article in Foreign Policy that is well-argued and heartening, no matter how counter-intuitive it might seem at first.

“For all we hear about Islam, Europe remains a stronger Christian fortress than people realize. What’s more, it is showing little sign of giving ground to Islam or any other faith for that matter,” Jenkins writes.

He eventually includes a shocking quote:

“Jürgen Habermas, a veteran leftist German philosopher stunned his admirers not long ago by proclaiming, ‘Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.’”

Wow.

Read the full article here: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3881 

-Colin Burch

The Wall Street Journal has an article today about the impact that illegal-immigration raids have on public school administrators and students. When various workplaces have been raided and illegal workers taken into custody, some public school students in those communities have lost one or both parents to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, who take the parents away for undefined “processing.” Ostensibly, many of these students, unlike their parents, were born in the U.S.A., making them U.S. citizens.

These circumstances might provide the strongest argument against deporting illegal immigrants. A comparison of U.S. public education performance with that of other industrialized, techno-centric countries produces a sobering conclusion: When public school kids have lost their parents, they have lost their only real source of education.

-Colin Burch

We’ve added a book review to the June-July edition. See http://www.liturgicalcredo.com/BookReviewMichaelPolanyiTheArtOfKnowing.html 

cheers,

Colin

John D. Spalding has written an hysterical essay that explains “Why it would be a sin to not to include dinosaurs in illustrated children’s Bibles.” Read it here: http://www.therevealer.org/archives/timely_002853.php 

Interested in Russian icons? See this article by Charles Twombly: http://www.liturgicalcredo.com/CharlesTwomblyJuneJuly2007.html