Sad.
“Christians who are looking a good deal on a gun need look no further than Frontier Firearms. The Kingston, Tennessee liberty-defending establishment began offering 5 percent discounts last week for anyone who says “I’m a Christian” before purchasing a new handgun.”
Source: Guns Are Cheaper At This Tennessee Store If You’re a Christian – The Daily Beast
Will Emmanuel ever be a megachurch? No. It’s not a splashy place that is known for its rock band or stage settings or theatrical services. There’s no “Shine Jesus Shine” here. It’s not “easy” and it gets into your soul in ways that you don’t understand at first. Going to Emmanuel on just Christmas morning and Easter is impossible.
Instead, Emmanuel is a strange and wonderful little church. I use that term deliberately. It’s a group of dedicated people from across socio-economic status, genders, colors, sexual orientations, political perspectives, religious theologies etc and it’s a place that changes who you are and how you think about God (whether you believe in a god or not).
Most of all, it’s a place where people pull up their socks, roll up their sleeves, and get to work doing what needs to be done.
The Apostle Paul would have been proud. I know I am. Now back to work.
“And that’s when Merianna Harrelson’s phone started blowing up. “I had church members calling to say ‘what are we going to do to help?’” said Harrelson, pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, S.C. “There was one woman who was taking on water at her home, and she was asking how she could help.”’
Source: S.C. churches stepping up to help flood victims | Baptist News Global
“An American professor happened upon a manuscript by one of the Bible’s translators at Cambridge, a discovery that may shed light on how the translators worked.”
Source: Earliest Known Draft of King James Bible Is Found, Scholar Says
We too easily understand the differences between “conservative” and “progressive” but our churches have taught us very little about what being “pastoral” actually means…
“Americans are often tempted to read Francis as a “progressive” pope who has tossed out the conservative playbook of Church leaders past. After all, he’s thrown down scathing critiques of global capitalism, pushed for radical reform on climate change, and shifted the Church’s tone on issues like homosexuality, divorce, and abortion. So as pundits map his views, many conclude that he’s pushing the church into uncharted territory. But as a 15th-century Vatican cartographer might have put it: hic sunt dracones.”
Essential reading as Pope Francis lands in the United States today to begin his tour of the country.
“If you are arguing against climate change, vaccines, evolution, etc. you do not get to invoke Galileo because in any accurate analogy, you are the religious fanatics (or the astronomers who blindly clung to Aristotle).”
If only I had a dime for every time I’ve encountered the “Yeah? Well, everyone thought Columbus was nuts too!” or “Yeah? Well, Galileo was right despite what all the scientists of his day said!” in a conversation.
Though our digital technologies have made life super-convenient for us – just tap and it’s yours, whatever it is – maybe it’s time for us to recapture some of the territory we’ve ceded. Time to pull the blinds, exclude the snoops, recapture the notion of privacy. Go offline.
Any volunteers? Right. I thought not. It won’t be easy.
Source: Margaret Atwood: we are double-plus unfree | Books | The Guardian
Part of my daily tension as someone who loves my whirring gadgets and gizmos and on demand lifestyle-thru-technology.
We’ve teamed up with Square to enable anyone in the US to make a donation directly to a US candidate through a Tweet, starting today. This is the fastest, easiest way to make an online donation, and the most effective way for campaigns to execute tailored digital fundraising, in real time, on the platform where Americans are already talking about the 2016 election and the issues they are passionate about.
Source: Political donations, now through a Tweet | Twitter Blogs
I wonder if this will get any coverage during tomorrow night’s Republican Presidential Debate?
Regardless, you can also send me money at my “cashtag” if you’d like to test the system: $samharrelson.
But seriously… why don’t more churches and non-profits use this??
“Since President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the War on Poverty 50 years ago, the characteristics of the nation’s poor have changed: A larger share of poor Americans today are in their prime working years and fewer are elderly. In addition, those in poverty are disproportionately children and people of any age who are black, Hispanic or both.
But perhaps just as striking is that the geographic distribution of the poor has changed dramatically, too. A new Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data finds that the South continues to be home to many of America’s poor, though to a lesser degree than a half-century ago. In 1960, half (49%) of impoverished Americans lived in the South. By 2010, that share had dropped to 41%.”
Source: How the geography of U.S. poverty has shifted since 1960 | Pew Research Center
Thomas Whitley and Sam Harrelson discuss the Prayer of Jabez, Sex and the Bible, pansexuality, the Pope’s new chair, and why Islam isn’t limited to the originating text.
Source: Thinking Religion: Jesus on the Kinsey Scale | Thinking.FM
It turns out that the problem of wisdom is not easy to solve. Acquiring it is dangerous. The individual who pursues true insight is, to use Nietzsche’s phrase (though the perception goes back at least as far as Plato), untimely. That is, he strives to be ahead of his time in his perceptions, albeit sometimes basing his thoughts on the intellectual achievements of the past. He is out of joint with his moment, and the result often is the enmity of others. People do not like his ideas, which seem to be an indictment of the way they are living. The thinker is a walking criticism of the lives of the rest, as Socrates showed. He paid with his life.
Source: Why We Need to Resurrect Our Souls
Working on an episode of Thinking Daily now with this as the soapbox.
