The Questioning Christian

Gratitude Check

Gratitude seems to be a mood-improver.  Here's an excerpt from The Parent of All Virtues, an essay by Steve Keeva, in the American Bar Association's ABA Journal, Feb. 2005, at 72:

When we see the world through the lens of gratitude, hassles get easier to bear, and stress recedes. And that's not an idle claim. Research supports it  * * *

Robert Gagnon: Homosexuality and the "Sacral Architecture" of Gender

Yesterday I attended an engaging, funny, and dangerously wrongheaded three-hour presentation about the Bible and homosexuality by Dr. Robert Gagnon, a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.  Dr. Gagnon  argued, convincingly, that Scripture prohibits homosexual activity.   What he didn't do was explain why that supposedly settles the matter.

In his presentation, Dr. Gagnon brilliantly spun a few phrases from Genesis, and a number of subsequent scriptural passages, into a detailed account of the alleged story of God's dividing the first "earthling" into male and female halves.  He argued that "humans are an example of sacral architecture," and that homosexual activity does violence to the Creator's design.   His presentation was clearly based on an article, "Why 'Gay Marriage' is Wrong," in which he summarized that part of his thesis:

An originally binary, or sexually undifferentiated, adam (“earthling”) is split down the “side” (a better translation of Hebrew tsela than “rib”)  to form two sexually differentiated persons. Marriage is pictured as the reunion of the two constituent parts or “other halves,” man and woman. 

Unfortunately, Dr. Gagnon's argument is built on sand, namely the unstated assumption that the author(s) of the Book of Genesis got the history right (to say nothing of the biology).   From everything I've ever learned in school and elsewhere, we have no reason to regard the scriptural tales of Adam and Eve as anything more than speculation.  And yet, on the basis of this ahistorical, pre-scientific speculation of 3,000 years ago, we have the effrontery to direct present-day gay and lesbian adults to remain alone and celibate throughout their lives. 

If Women Ruled the World ....

Go to Kinesis and find out.

Shroud of Turin Might Be the "Right Age" After All

A New York Times article quotes a scientist as saying that radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin to the 1200s or 1300s may be inaccurate.  The portion of the Shroud that was tested may have been a patch, not part of the original material.

Most Episcopal Parishes Are Still Quietly Going About Christ's Work -- Article

Simon Sarmiento's Thinking Anglicans blog comments on an article by Joan Gunderson challenging the growth claims of the very-conservative "Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes."  Gunderson is an officer of a group of dissident, liberal Episcopalians within the Diocese of Pittsburgh, home of network moderator Bishop Robert W. Duncan.  She asserts that "approximately 27 percent of [Pittsburgh] diocesan communicants belong to parishes that have officially repudiated the network."  (Emphasis added.) 

Gunderson also asserts:

Bumper Stickers for God's Vehicle

The Wittenburg Door (via Father Jake Stops the World) has a great set of lines for bumper stickers that God might display "on his/her tailgate[.]"  My favorites are:

Oh, Evolve!

and

Warning: in case of rapture, I'll be just as surprised as you.

Father Jake invites readers to contribute their own ideas.  Now if I only had that kind of wit ....

Weddings at Sunday Eucharist?

For some time now I’ve thought that weddings ought to occur at the beginning of a regular parish Sunday Eucharist, in the same way baptisms are conducted at many parishes. That would send the message that the wedding is a community event, not a private party.  In some RC parishes, some weddings apparently are being celebrated at Sunday Mass because of a shortage of priests:

Ancient Doesn't Necessarily Mean Correct

Are the Christians of the first two centuries less likely to have wandered into theological error than we of later times?  Commenter Mark G at the Pontificator blog apparently thinks so:

In my youth and even now I figure that (1) the Christians of the first two centuries, being closer in time to the Apostles, were less likely to have erred than those who came later (corollary – question any teaching that seems to have popped up for the first time after 500 A.D.) ....

I dunno -- the earliest Christians indisputably got it wrong in expecting Jesus to return in triumph during their lifetimes to overthrow evil and restore Israel to its rightful place.  (Then-Professor, now-Bishop N.T. Wright is demonstrably misguided in arguing to the contrary, but that's a topic requiring a more detailed discussion.)  The early Christians also believed the sun orbited the earth and that epileptic symptoms were caused by demons.  Finally, we don't really know all that much about the theology of the earliest Christians; the surviving written records are those written, and preserved from the ravages of time, by the winning faction(s).  So all in all, I'm not quite ready to believe that those folks were materially less likely to make theological errors than we are.

Fun With Textbook Stickers in Scientific American

Steve Mirsky gets creative with textbook stickers in his AntiGravity column in the February 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine:

... As this issue of Scientific American went to press, a federal judge in Atlanta was in the process of deciding whether biology textbooks in the county could continue to sport a warning sticker that read: "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered."   

*  *  *

But why pick on evolution in the first place when there's so much to be offended by in virtually any science class?  ... Here are some suggestions:

Cassini and Titan: A Triumph of Rationalism

Today's Wall Street Journal has a brief editorial ($) about a recent triumph of a disciplined, rationalist mindset that deals with the universe as it is, not as we wish it were:

Over the weekend the world was treated to a spectacle that was literally out of this world: Color pictures and audio recordings from the hazy, windy, orange-tinged surface of Titan, largest of Saturn's moons. These come to us courtesy of the European Space Agency's Huygens probe, which landed intact after a two-week descent from its mothership, the NASA satellite Cassini.

*  *  *

It is fitting the spacecraft bear the names they do. Christiaan Huygens discovered Titan in 1655. Giovanni Cassini discovered four more of Saturn's moons and correctly surmised the composition of Saturn's rings in the 1670s and '80s. Both men were not merely astronomers but also mathematicians and technologists. Above all, they were disciples of rationalism, skepticism and the scientific method, children of the Enlightenment.

So too, it might be said, are the scientists and engineers in Pasadena, California and Darmstadt, Germany, who have now put humanity's footprint on Titan. ...

(Emphasis added.)