I mean. How can I avoid reposting this?
Putting the "Local" in Local Church
“Rather than calling us to transcendence, God forms us and guides us through place.”
- Hannah Anderson
What if part of our problem as Christians in the West is that we have swallowed the lie of “liquid modernity”: That the place where you are at present is secondary to where you are going, and what you might become? Read this excellent article on the importance of place in the Christian tradition.
Christianity in a Secular World
I don’t know anything about France, but this article seems like it accurately describes our cultural moment:
”In Café Flores where Sartre and Camus discussed the absurdity of life, people scan their phones safely cocooned from such disturbing ideas. Trains, lifts, even waiting at traffic lights are all opportunities to rehearse our secular liturgy: look down, pull out, flip open, here and now, here and now.”
And what we at CTK hope to be:
"Christians carrying within them the reign of heaven will need to let their weirdness shine; their time-consuming religious habits, their inconvenient commitment and love of others, their solidly unspectacular contentedness, and their embrace of weakness that allows the power and grace of their servant Lord to glow. The front line of secularism is here, but the resistance has begun."
Belonging
“The only real remedy for the dangers of false belonging is the true belonging to a fellowship of people who are not so much like-minded as like-hearted.”
-Alan Jacobs, How to Think
Are you a boomer or a sticker?
“Just as we’ve been created to dwell in a certain place, God has designed us to live within the boundary lines of our bodies. We’re both emplaced and embodied creatures, surrounded by fences on all sides. An enduring mark of spiritual maturity is the faculty to dwell within these fences. The quality of our relationships largely depends on our willingness to recognize and live within.” - Jeremy Linneman
Read the rest here.
How Christ the King?
We continue our series on the mission and values of Christ the King by trying to answer the question, “How do we love our neighbor?”
We have to answer these questions, because Christianity seems complicated, but it isn’t. It’s hard. And there’s a difference. And the difference is in humility.
Farming and Philosophy
In an excellent interview in the New York Times, Wendell Berry poses the question: What if our modern desire to live with total freedom, without limits, is the thing that is destroying our culture economically, agriculturally, and environmentally?
A deeper question: what if that desire isn’t just modern?
What if the incarnation of God (and his body throughout time) into a particular place is the only hope?
“We will have to go back to tradition. I am unsure when we began to think of, for instance, the 15th Psalm and Jesus’s law of neighborly love as optional. They are not optional, as I think the Amish example proves, and as proved by present failure.”
Who is Our Problem?
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Confident Humility
“The church must bear in mind that among her very enemies are hidden her future citizens; and when confronted with them she must not think it a fruitless task to bear with their hostility until she finds them confessing the faith…Some predestined friends, as yet unknown even to themselves, are concealed among our most open enemies.”