Scrolling around...May 14, 2013

Tragic Worship
...Of all places, the Church should surely be the most realistic. The Church knows how far humanity has fallen, understands the cost of that fall in both the incarnate death of Christ and the inevitable death of every single believer. In the psalms of lament, the Church has a poetic language for giving expression to the deepest longings of a humanity looking to find rest not in this world but the next. In the great liturgies of the Church, death casts a long, creative, cathartic shadow. Our worship should reflect the realities of a life that must face death before experiencing resurrection.

It is therefore an irony of the most perverse kind that churches have become places where Pascalian distraction and a notion of entertainment that eschews the tragic seem to dominate just as comprehensively as they do in the wider world. I am sure that the separation of church buildings from graveyards was not the intentional start of this process, but it certainly helped to lessen the presence of death. The present generation does not have the inconvenience of passing by the graves of loved ones as it gathers for worship. Nowadays, death has all but vanished from the inside of churches as well...

How Fornication Messes Up Marriage
...Because sex rightly understood is such a good and important gift, it is not wrong for Christians or anyone else to try to defend it from harm or perversion. Both pornography and fornication—as well as lust in general—threaten the sanctity of the marriage bed. In Christianity, the husband loves his wife qua his wife; the wife loves her husband qua her husband. As Canon Scott Houser so clearly illustrated in one of his Anglican Way Institute lectures (starting around minute 26:11), that forbids imagining your spouse as someone else. You are not loving your husband himself or wife herself when you are trying to ignore their self or unique personhood while extracting pleasure from them as an object. In such a case, sex itself becomes a selfish end rather than a sacrificial means to union...

NBC Worries Pope's New Saints Will Hurt Islam's Feelings
Pope Francis set a record by canonizing 800 15th Century laymen that refused to convert to Islam and brutally died because of it...

UK Pol: We Should Kill Disabled Children Like We Kill Deformed Lambs
British politician Colin Brewer: "We are just animals," Brewer continued. "You can’t have lambs running around with five legs and two heads. It would be put down, smashed against the wall and be dealt with." I always love when people say humans are just animals because the next sentence out of their mouths usually goes a long way toward proving it.

When asked if there was any difference between killing a lamb or a human being he simply said, according to Disability News, "I think the cost has got to be evaluated."

"It is not something I would like to do but there is only so much in the bucket," he reportedly said. "If you are talking about giving services to the community or services to the individual, the balance has got to be struck."

Justice Seizes AP Phone Records in 'Massive, Unprecedented Intrusion'
...In a letter of protest sent to Attorney General Eric Holder Monday, AP President and Chief Executive Officer Gary Pruitt said the government sought and obtained information far beyond anything that could be justified by any specific investigation. He demanded the return of the phone records and the destruction of all copies.

"There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters. These records potentially reveal communications with confidential sources across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP's newsgathering operations, and disclose information about AP's activities and operations that the government has no conceivable right to know," Pruitt said...

IRS Employees Donated Over Twice as Much to Obama in 2012
...But a review of political campaign contributions during the 2012 election cycle paints a slightly different picture, one that deviates from patterns of support found in the rest of the country. According to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, IRS employees donated over two-and-a-half times more to Barack Obama than to Republican challenger Mitt Romney...

What Media (Really) Fears About Gosnell Trial
...I suggest that the real reason for a pro-choice media is that shoddy practitioners, abortion clinics, and regulators seem commonplace across the nation. Gosnell alone had 46 lawsuits, but continued to practice in broad daylight...

Faith-Themed Television Boosted by 'The Bible'
The Bible miniseries has been one of cable television's top performers of the year, averaging more than 11 million viewers per episode. That success has sparked both enthusiasm and skepticism among Christian media watchers...