Jamieson

I guess after half a millennium it is high time to re-examine the Reformation. After all, that revolution was a considerable first step in Christianity’s long pilgrimage to today’s more confident and iconoclastic Progressive form.

It is wonderful to find insights and practices like these getting into print. These essays voice for me just the sorts of issues our new and more selective faith(s) should be guiding us toward, climate above all.

The story should be approached more carefully in order to capture its spirit, its “message,” and less doctrinally. Though we have come to celebrate this gem as a—perhaps the--Christmas story, I’d urge us progressives to put aside the story’s Christian provenance while still admiring its central, its deeply humane affirmation. And we should above all appreciate the profoundly secular arena in which it plays out.

William Irwin has written a very clear and articulate argument in support of the special value of doubt. Both modest and yet far-ranging, the book gets into both epistemological and theological matters. Irwin proposes a new and challenging way to approach a Being whom we have grown up thinking of as Almighty, as an Absolute.

Progressive thinkers cannot avail ourselves of the false security fundamentalist believers bring to church Sundays and to the Bible daily. We can, however, compensate for our dismissal of literalism with an answerably intense commitment to metaphor. And metaphor proves especially powerful in narratives. Narrative masters like Dickens can move our hearts as they bring our fellow creatures vividly and credibly alive. But they can do more: they can provoke our intellects and excite our imaginations. We love a story, instinctively, but we go a step farther and subject the tale to closer scrutiny and more probing critical analysis. (That, incidentally, is why I find Luke’s story of the road to Emmaus one of the most affecting New Testament narratives. It’s an account of a real-life journey, peopled with thoughtful and feeling human beings, who move from grief to joyful insight.)

“It is reassuring to read that the Episcopal Church does not intend to compromise its support for gay marriage (“Episcopal Church Stands firm

  A famous poet, William Wordsworth defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” I wonder if it might be productive to apply that

Music is, to my mind, the purest form of artistic expression, even when, as in most of these religious works I am examing, it is wedded to Biblical texts and thus tied implicitly to the doctrinal expressions of faith they proclaim.

The books of the New Testament are not the infallible words of God. The texts were in a state of flux during the faith s early centuries. We can and should build on that flexible tradition.