THE DESERT CAN be an empty place where the lost are driven insane by inner demons, or it can be a place of refuge and real where pilgrims escape the insanity of a chaotic world. Our desert experience is determined by how we cope with being alone. Solitude can bring strange illusions and despair or it can strip us of faulty dependence, filling us with a desire for our Creator.
Quadra is the kind of place where you hear the oysters pop as you stroll down the beach, breathing in the fresh sea air. Vestiges of turbulent times are found in the cafeteria on the ferry from Campbell River. Under the ly lacquered trim, scrawled like a fossil, is an ancient peace symbol, or an upside down chicken track as the early locals saw it. From a table filled with laughter comes an anachronism of an early time, "That's really right on!" The slip doesn't go unnoticed, everyone groans. The men's hair is still long but groomed
Everybody loves to see justice done on somebody else. Justice has become an off-putting term for me. I associate it with political correctness and link it to individual rights. Justice seems to me merely ideological, an excuse for group or self interest. I know this attitude of mine must be prejudiced since every moral perspective, including Aristotle and the Bible, place justice close to the starting point of its ethics. It's time that I take a more objective look at the virtue starting with the reasons for my bias against it.
Stealing from the title of Dickens' book A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Watershed's story could be equally called A Tale of Two Wisdoms: God's Wisdom and Human Wisdom (1991-2015). I tell this story not in order to disparage the intellect or learning from a human point of view but rather to show how we might have used these two wisdoms incorrectly. Why and how wisdom gets expressed in our lives is what I have in mind.
What does this to do with Swedish author Henning Mankell or his crime mystery Faceless Killers? This is a book response, not a parental rant against the strange world of technology. Kurt Wallander, Mankell's frumpy, grumpy Swedish crime investigator and I have something in common. We are both in danger of becoming culturally irrelevant, maybe extinct; both of us fear this looming prospect.
We've been looking at how Christianity is interpreted differently by different groups of people. I find this fascinating because it always seems easy to think that how I define Christianity is simply THE definition that's out there. But there are so many ways. Richard Niebuhr identifies fives ways that Christianity gets expressed in the world: 1) Christ Against Culture - The easiest way to describe this definition is that it's the one that we grew up in. It's the way of the Anabaptists who chose to reject the close relationship that Luther supported between the church and state, and struck
Our short but well-preserved letter from Thyatira isn't a find of the Nag's notability but it does contribute to understanding what some members of the community in Thyatira felt about John's jolting letter of admonition. This recently discovered response to Elder John was found by Ian Hodder, a lucky and meticulous Anotolian archeologist, to the now cold forge in the ruins of the Thyatiran Bronzeworker's Association in 2006. Along with the copy was Decius Gallio Gallipor's request to be excused from the upcoming Minerva's Guild Festival on March 15 for religious reasons. Decius