I’ve been pondering one of the recent reports from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths, for a while now. (There’s also a pretty good newspaper article about it here.) This seems to be another one of those areas in which my cultural childhood formation rode the leading edge [...]
Or at least that’s true for most of us in the United States who treat Christmas as over on the 25th of December and begin gearing up for a New Year’s bash. (Though, in truth, it’s mostly been quiet celebrations at home for my wife and me for many years now.) Much to my wife’s [...]
I just wanted to take a moment and wish any and all who might wander by here a very, merry Christmas. This is, of course, the season during which Christians celebrate the nativity of our Lord, the wonder of the Incarnation. But it has also become a broader American celebration of family. For those who [...]
This question ties together some of my earlier musings. What actually matters to me in all the complex history of the Church? For there are things that do matter deeply to me and go well beyond my long-standing interest in trying to perceive the world through the lenses of different cultures and times. The history [...]
The title of this post flows from the fact that a lot of the discussion within Christianity in the US sometimes seems to revolve around “modernity.” Now, I will not argue that the modern culture in (primarily) Western Europe and the US was not significant for Christianity. It’s pretty much the culture that gave birth [...]
The two threads of the problem of translation and the impact of modern textual criticism strike me as interwoven with the work of history in different ways. Any work of translation, of course, is an intrinsically historical effort. Language is closely correlated with culture. So before an idea can be expressed in a different language, [...]
There are many aspects in the study of ancient cultures and life that make it difficult for us to grasp the way people thought and interacted and the way various events are tied together. Not least of these problems is the essentially ephemeral nature of most human artifacts. A lot of people I encounter seem [...]
I must confess that I’ve had a hard time determining which thread of my interactions with the Church and its history to tackle first. However, given the sort of Christianity within which I found myself, the first thread of strangeness I encountered had to do with the Bible, so I suppose it makes the most [...]
I was around 30 years old when my lifelong spiritual journey, which included many legitimate intersections with Christianity (both positive and negative) finally culminated in an identity that began to be shaped by, in, and through Jesus of Nazareth. I call it a pivotal point in a very long and extended process of conversion to [...]
Since I frequently discuss and engage aspects of Church history, I thought it might be helpful to do a series that explores how I interact with history. In order to do that, I think I need to begin with the way an interest in and exploration of history in general has intersected and shaped my [...]