Moving Forward

It’s Saturday. Walking rapidly, you are almost at the school’s back lot where, like every other Saturday in summer, the neighborhood gathers for a brisk game of whiffle ball. You aren’t concerned at being late. You have the ball. The game won’t start without you. You round the final corner and sure enough. The gang is all there. You see the fat orange bat on the ground by home plate. It’s not your favorite but you know the crowd will soon relish your crack of plastic on plastic. As your team’s slugger, you will be first up, and with this bat every pitch is a homer…or close enough. The pitcher walks from the mound as you approach, and you toss him the whiffle. But he doesn't turn back around. Surprised, you watch him continue walking towards you, his feet skipping like he's won a free dilly stick from the Dairy Queen. “Listen,” he says excitedly. “I did some math and guess what?” You don’t know. “If you subtract 50 from 2020 you get 1970,” he says, his eyes boring into...

  (courtesy photo St. Stephen's Episcopal ) Compartmentalism is not sustainable. We defined compartmentalism in this article and now need to discuss our options. Option one is grim: a house divided cannot stand. With two world wars under our belt and the scourge of genocide that keeps cropping up we instinctively understand that polarization is lethal to humanity and opens the door to an authoritarian takeover. Option two is to voluntarily unify for the greater good. Option two seems the better way to go. Parts of world are well on the way to lateral unification already. Having spent a year in Asia, I am impressed with how successfully the ten ASEAN countries have joined hands to support each other economically and connect inter-governmentally while retaining their traditional distinctives. It is hard to imagine a scenario that would take these nations into war with one another ever again. Lateral unification is the Worldview I find myself promoting for the Church. Although I ...

Wait! Before you brand me a heretic, take a deep breath, and hear me out.  My reason for rejecting the Christian worldview is that modern Christianity has become a pocket “ism”, one of the many “isms” that define the spirit of the age in our day. The technical term for this is conventionalism, a word that stems from the word convention. Everyone on earth today lives according the convention that makes the most sense to his or her own mind. What’s more, it is possible for one person to adhere to more than one convention depending on what day of the week it is or what task is uppermost on our to do list. In our compartmentalized world, it does not seem strange to decry abuse and low pay in the workplace on Monday and then Tuesday save some money by ordering clothes you know were made overseas in a sweathouse. It does not seem strange then on Wednesday to donate those savings to a food bank while decrying on Thursday the welfare system in a heated Facebook debate. Or to hire a woman...