The South is Christ-haunted

"I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted." -- Flannery O'Connor, in her article The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South

(Just saw this quote in a Tom Cannon post and thought it was so well said that it needed to be reposted.)

tom cannon quote

When "authenticity" becomes a commodity it is immediately exclusionary and completely full of crap.

Who needs Jesus when you can just click for forgiveness?

Click.Forgive

I am not making this up. My brother-in-law sent me the link. He probably uses the level 4 Forgiveness several times a day, knowing him. He claims that not loving bacon is a level 3 offense. Who knew?

Mend broken, Make strong the weak, Vanquish evil

They were "ready, finally, with all their hearts, to take that ancient oath: to mend those who are broken, to make strong the weak, and without hesitation, [to] vanquish the evil."

Why is it more OK when owls say it? Why aren't Christians saying it more?

This makes Jesus facepalm (times inifinity)

I can honestly say that this is just as good as the original....



Don't miss these money quotes:

"God is my friend."

"Worshippin' Worshippin' Yeah!"

"Church can be fun. You know that it is."

"So excited. We so excited. We knowin' Jesus is alive today."

Oh, and please don't miss the cafe shot.

Not only did they entirely capture the simplistic, contrived feeling of the original, but they managed to map it directly onto the church. What's most frightening of all is the number of people who will watch this and think this is what church and Christianity are all about.

I think when you hit this point you stop facepalming and you just walk right over to the wall and start banging your head against it.

New Wine in Old Wineskins <- not always the best metaphor

"But the heart of Pacifica had always been and remained today the tropical islands of the ocean called Pacific in memory of the largest sea on Earth. The dwellers on these islands lived, not precisely in the old ways, but with the memory of the old ways still in the background of all sounds and at the edges of all sights. Here the sacred kava was still sipped in the ancient ceremonies. Here the memories of ancient heroes were kept alive. Here the gods still spoke into the ears of holy men and women. And if they went home to grass huts containing refrigerators and networked computers, what of that? The gods did not give unreceivable gifts. The trick of it was finding a way to let new things into one's life without killing that life to accommodate them." - Orson Scott Card in his book Children of the Mind

Part of God's Story - a series of quotes from the book, Resident Aliens

"Too often, we depict salvation as that which provides us with a meaningful existence when we achieve a new self-understanding. here, with our emphasis on the narrative nature of Christian life, we are saying that salvation is baptism into a community that has so truthful a story that we forget ourselves and our anxieties long enough to become part of that story, a story God has told in Scripture and continues to tell in Israel and the church."

"It is our baptismal responsibility to tell this story to our young, to live it before them, to take time to be parents in a world that (though intent on blowing itself to bits) is God's creation (a fact we would not know without this story. We have children as a witness that the future is not left up to us and that life, even in a threatening world, is worth living -- and not because 'Children are the hope of the future,' but because God is the hope of the future." (emphasis theirs)

"The church must be created new, in each generation, not through procreation but through baptism."

"People of God do not let the world determine how they respond to tomorrow."

"To launch out on a journey is to move toward some goal. Of course, in the journey of faith, we have no clear idea of what our end will be except that it shall be, in some form, true and complete friendship with God. For now, our daily experiences of testing and confirmation of that friendship sustain us. Perhaps this explains why Jesus' ethic was so thoroughly eschatological -- an ethic bound up with this proclamation of the end of history. Ethics is a function of the telos, the end. It makes all the difference in the world how one regards the end of the world, "end" not so much in the sense of its final breath, but "end" in the sense of the purpose, the goal, the result."

"Travelers, in the midst of the vicissitudes of the journey, learn to trust one another when the going is rough."

[The apostle] "Peter stands out as a true individual, or better, a true character, not because he had become 'free' or 'his own person,' but because he had become attached to the Messiah and messianic community, which enabled him to lay hold of his life, to make so much more of his life than if he had been left to his own devices."

-- Resident Aliens (Hauerwas and Willimon), chapter three.