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Category: Worth Repeating

Published March 3, 2012 by Doug, the patient.

I recently wrote a guest post for Dr. David J Dunn on his blog.  He is a great friend and amazing theologian with sharp contemporary insights.  I am writing for a different audience and focusing on the positives of what other’s have experienced as a horrible childhood.   I like to think of it as rich and challenging experience that didn’t entirely push me over the edge.  These are thoughts on the best of it. 

“I have always wanted to be holy, I just could never figure out how. As a very young child in the Church of the Nazarene I would hear wondrous stories of revival and passion and healing and transformation, I just couldn’t seem to get my hands on it personally. This was not for the lack of trying, I just didn’t know how to try…

Continued at David’s Blog  “Nazbeen Confessions: From an Outpatient Monk”

Worth Repeating

Stanley Hauerwas and Children and the Reign of God.

Published December 2, 2011 by Doug Harrison

 “Jesus called to himself a child – the essence of one who is powerless, dependent, needy, little, and poor. He placed the child ‘in the midst of them,’ as a concrete, visible sacrament of how the Kingdom looks. Jesus’ act with the child is interesting. In many of our modern, sophisticated congregations, children are often viewed as distractions. We tolerate children only to the extent they promise to become “adults” like us. Adult members sometimes complain they cannot pay attention to the sermon, they cannot listen to the beautiful music, when fidgety children are beside them in the pews. “Send them away,” many adults say. Create “Children’s Church” so these distracting children can be removed in order that we adults can pay attention.

Interestingly, Jesus put a child in the centre of his disciples, “in the midst of them,” in order to help them pay attention. The child, in Jesus’ mind, was not an annoying distraction. The child was a last-ditch effort by God to help the disciples pay attention to the odd nature of God’s kingdom. Few acts of Jesus are more radical, countercultural, than his blessing of children.”

–Stanley Hauerwas

Worth Repeating

childrenHauerwaskingdom of God

Published November 15, 2011 by Doug Harrison

“If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus is just as selfish as we are or we’ve got to acknowledge that he commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition. And then admit that we just don’t want to do it.”
– Stephen Colbert

Worth Repeating

Greedy with Theology?

Published October 28, 2011 by Doug Harrison

O Lord, thinking about you, being fascinated with theological ideas and discussions, being excited about histories of Christian spirituality and stimulated by thoughts and ideas about prayer and meditation, all of this can be as much an expression of greed as the unruly desire for food, possessions, or power.

Every day I see again that only you can teach me to pray, only you can set my heart at rest, only you can let me dwell in your presence. No book, no idea, no concept or theory will ever bring me close to you unless you yourself are the one who lets these instruments become the way to you.

But Lord, let me at least remain open to your initiative; let me wait patiently and attentively for that hour when you will come and break through all the walls I have erected. Teach me, O Lord, to pray.

-Henri Nouwen, in A Cry for Mercy

Worth Repeating