Luminous Darkness

This is a bit of old news, but I haven’t really read reports of it in too many places. It seems that there were some interesting seating arrangements for world leaders at the Pope’s funeral because they were seated in alphabetical order. In particular, this put Israel very close to Iran and Syria, and amazingly the Israeli president shook hands and exchanged greetings with the leaders of both nations during the giving of the peace near the end of the mass. The Guardian printed this report from the Associated Press. Although all parties are saying that not too much should be read into these gestures, I still think that this might taken as a sign of some hope for the future.

For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, I strongly recommend reading Jon Carroll’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle about Unitarian Jihad. One never knows where they might strike next! A choice quote from their manifesto:

People of the United States! We are Unitarian Jihad! We can strike without warning. Pockets of reasonableness and harmony will appear as if from nowhere! Nice people will run the government again! There will be coffee and cookies in the Gandhi Room after the revolution.

Oh, and my Unitarian Jihad Name is Brother Katana of Courteous Debate. Get yours here.

An article in Christian Today discusses some recent comments by Barry Morgan, Archbishop of Wales where he says that the Anglican church is in serious danger of becoming irrelevant because its members cannot hold a civilized debate between themselves:

If the church of God can’t conduct a debate in a civilised way when it claims to be a reconciled and reconciling community - what message does that give to the world? We cannot as a church call for compassion, peace and justice in our nation and in our world if we as Christians do not exemplify those virtues in our own lives and in our dealings with one another.

However, the part of the article that I find especially interesting is at the end, where the Rev. David Philips, the general secretary of The Church Society, says the following in response to some suggestions from Archbishop Morgan about liberalizing attitudes towards homosexuality in the church:

If he thinks he’s right can he show us any church which is growing by giving this message? Those that are growing are those that are not giving compromising messages.

My question here is why are we so obsessed with the growth of the church? It is true that many mainline Protestant denominations have seen a decline in membership over the past few decades, and so it makes sense that people might be concerned with dropping numbers, but it has gotten to the point that church growth is seen as the sole issue that people feel is worth any kind of discussion (other than sex of course). However, if we really believe that the Church of God is eternal and made by God, it seems unlikely that it is simply going to disappear. Additionally, if we believe that we have some of the right ideas about the way in which the church should exist (not that I believe that any one church can fully encompass the true worship of God), then I do not think that we need to be overly concerned about how many people there are in our churches. God will still be praised and glorified regardless of whether there are 1,000 worshipers, 100 worshipers, or one worshiper. For me, it would make more sense to spend my time talking to people as individuals about the life-transforming message of Christianity in a deep and meaningful way rather than trying to take the quick way out and convert the masses with simple truths and easy answers.

I have finally decided to get out and give some real blogging software a try. I had been feeling for a while that the kinds of posts I was making about theology/history/philosophy/etc. on LiveJournal were not really what people there were interested in, so now I have set up Luminous Darkness. After talking to some friends and looking around a bit on the net, I decided that WordPress was the right program to play around with. Only time will tell if the relationship will work out, but I am optimistic and generally happy so far. I will still use LiveJournal for personal news, so if you are a friend and you want to know about what is going on in my life, then let me know and I will add you to that source of information. One other note is that while I am quite pleased with the theme that I have picked for this blog, I have at least one close friend who uses it as well so I will probably be looking around for something else to use in the future.

In conclusion, you are all most welcome. Please feel free to browse around and enjoy!

NB: All of the posts previous to this one have been moved over from my LiveJournal. However, I have left the comments there, as there were not many, and I didn’t have the permission of the posters to move them here.