I defer to no one in my love for America and for Christianity. I have devoted my life to the study of both of them. I have tried to live up to my association with them. And I take very seriously Jesus’s teachings, in this case his saying that those who live by the sword will also die by the sword. Something called Christianity has become entangled in exactly the strain of nationalism that is militaristic, ready to spend away the lives of our young, and that can only understand dissent from its views as a threat or a defection, a heresy in the most alienating and stigmatizing sense of the word. We are not the first country where this has happened. The fact that it was the usual thing in Europe, and had been for many centuries, was one great reason for attempting to separate church and state here.
Jesus’s aphorism may be taken to mean simply that those who deal in violence are especially liable to suffer violence. True enough. But death is no simple thing when Jesus speaks of it. His thoughts are not our thoughts, the limits of our perceptions are not limits he shares. We must imagine him seeing the whole of our existence, our being beyond mortality, beyond time. There is that other death he can foresee, the one that really matters. When Christians abandon Christian standards of behavior in the defense of Christianity, when Americans abandon American standards of conduct in the name of America, they inflict harm that would not be in the power of any enemy. As Christians they risk the kind of harm to themselves to which the Bible applies adjectives like “everlasting.”
[gallery] The Hotel Okura in Tokyo is closing
GOP voters who are passionate supporters of Kim Davis may well find that photo [with Ted Cruz] inspiring, and appreciate that a Republican presidential candidate stood by her in her hour of need. But I can easily imagine that — fair or not — in terms of its visual symbolism, that shot reminds suburban Republican voters, even some Christians, what they don’t like about the party and its direction.
Britain is braced for the onslaught of Light Afternoon Drizzle Brian, then the nightmare of Rather Blustery Morning Samantha. Stock up on nail guns and hardboard now. The assault from our malevolent skies never ceases.It sounds like a Monty Python sketch, but it is real. The Met Office, and its Irish equivalent, Met Éireann, have “teamed up” in a new venture that invites the public to send in names for “extreme weather events” affecting the British Isles. This follows the practice of giving people’s names to hurricanes and other mega‑storms, which has been in use for decades.
It’s a nice PR wheeze, perhaps, but it illustrates a salient point. No other country on Earth talks more about its weather – and no other country on Earth has such a misguided and factually incorrect impression of what its weather actually is.
Electioneering
In the unlikely event that anyone reading this is a member of a Deanery Synod in the diocese of Ely, and has a vote: I am running as an Ely representative of the laity for General Synod and, brothers and sisters, I solicit your suffrages.
THIS MAN MUST BE STOPPED
The Millions of Catholics Who Aren't Catholic
The Millions of Catholics Who Aren’t Catholic
Plenty of Americans have picked their religion, and so they think of religion as something to be picked. Americans have developed this distinction, which would not have made sense centuries ago. As the Pew report shows, American Catholics hold onto the identity that they have inherited, but they don’t think of that identity as religious unless they have chosen it for themselves.
Ernest Hemingway’s Theory of Omission seems to me to be saying to writers, “Back off. Let the reader do the creating.” To cause a reader to see in her mind’s eye an entire autumnal landscape, for example, a writer needs to deliver only a few words and images—such as corn shocks, pheasants, and an early frost. The creative writer leaves white space between chapters or segments of chapters. The creative reader silently articulates the unwritten thought that is present in the white space. Let the reader have the experience. Leave judgment in the eye of the beholder. When you are deciding what to leave out, begin with the author. If you see yourself prancing around between subject and reader, get lost. Give elbow room to the creative reader. In other words, to the extent that this is all about you, leave that out.
[gallery] Sometimes you just need a photo of the Faroe Islands.
