Carl

The battle for the soul of America rages on, now focusing on Thanksgiving. On the one hand are those who offer the image of peace and harmony between Europeans and Indigenous people, on the other those who remind us of the savagery of the Europeans as they sought to exterminate the inhabitants of the land. Which is it?

The 2020 US presidential election put on full display a country divided. 74 million voters hoped for a repudiation of Trumpism that they did not get. 70 million others voted to stay the course, and made it painfully clear that we live in a fragile democracy. The current moment in American history is fraught with the danger of disintegration.

In looking at how the Jews see the Adam and Eve story – that it was a story of taking responsibility and moving out of innocence etc. How does this reconcile however with Paul ( a Jew) in Romans Ch5 where he appears to take on a more traditional even literal approach with Adam and Sin entering in , The Fall etc. ?

We don’t know how it happened. A small band that practiced justice and equality for all became an institution that demanded slaves obey their owners, women obey their husbands, and everyone obey the wealthy elite.

In our society, where automation and technology threaten to put more and more of us at the end of the line, it might prove helpful to turn to Jesus’ parable in our striving to determine anew the meaning of labor and reward.

The resurrection of Jesus happened before the crucifixion. Furthermore, I suspect it was the rich and powerful who reversed the order of events. Confused? Let me explain.

The wealthy have always been in control. They are today, they were when Jesus walked the planet. He tried a revolution, but the wealthy commandeered the theology and killed the revolution.

Violence against people of color. Violence against women. Authoritarian and confused reaction to a pandemic. A fundamentalist distortion of Christianity. And controlling influence by the rich and powerful.

In the space of a month, once again we have witnessed here in the US the murder of black people by white people, both civilian and uniformed, and we have witnessed the instant and total poverty of a major segment of our population. The two are not unrelated.

Question & Answer   Q: By A Reader I recently read that a team of astrophysicists have concluded that there are over a trillion

The fact of the matter is that although Luther turned to the Bible in order to attack church doctrine, he turned to it as he interpreted it. He never believed it to be inerrant.

Last week was about as intense as it gets. Caught between a merciless virus and the cessation of social activity, beneath the surface calm lies a persistent tension ready to erupt. The anxiety was underscored by the two main religious mythologies that drive segments of our culture, the Passover and the Crucifixion/Resurrection of Jesus.

Andrew Cuomo today is a phenomenon. He speaks every day about the coronavirus and his press conferences have become must-see tv. Why? Many reasons, but at heart he speaks to spiritual yearning in all people, a yearning that focuses not on religion and/or God, but on the truth and depth of our common humanity. 

We often refer to the Bible as if it were a book. It is not. It is a composite of many books, most of which are agreed upon by the various church bodies, but not all.

When I was at Union Theological Seminary in NYC back in the mid 60s there were two courses on the history of ancient Israel, one based on a book by William Albright, the other on a text by a German scholar, Martin Noth. The interesting thing was that they presented two quite different histories of Israel.

Despite the colloquialism about the “patience of Job”, in the majority of the biblical book, Job was not patient. In fact, he was angry with God, shaking his fist at the heavens, and demanding an answer from the Almighty to a most troubling question: Why, O God, is there innocent suffering in this world?? 

The words apocalypse and eschaton have been resurrected from the dustbin of theological jargon, and they both refer to what happens at the end of time. More specifically, they point to the end of life as we know it, and today that prophecy comes in two forms.

Thanksgiving is a holiday filled not only with the joy of sharing, but also with contradiction and irony.

It is commonly assumed that Jesus had 12 male disciples, the number being fashioned after the 12 tribes of Israel. Whether or not there were 12 tribes named after 12 men is a question for next week. The question for today is: did Jesus have women disciples, and who were they?

Most of us did not know what was happening, but we do now. The industrial age offered to humanity comforts and conveniences never before imagined, but what we are now discovering is that the bedrock of this modern civilization is a resource that we have unwittingly and precipitously transformed into what could be the cause of our own destruction.

Part One of our answer to the question of who Jesus was, was basically presented on a secular plane. That changes now, as much of what follows is presented as a statement of belief rather than history.

The poor of the planet stare us in the face. Disparity of wealth, in our country and elsewhere, is an outrage that cannot be endured. The numbers are literally unbelievable. The earth provides, but greed monopolizes the table, a select few taking it all while the many stare and starve.

The question about Jesus is not a simple question. In search of the answer, wars have been fought, laws passed and broken, kingdoms gained and lost, and heretics burned at the stake.

This simple combination of “the Bible is the word of God” and “Jesus died for your sins” is what the public thinks lie at the core of Christian faith. I remember being told at Union Theological Seminary in 1963 that what we were learning would take 50 years to trickle down to the church membership.