This is the fifth part of a six-part series about an imaginary journey to an Episcopal seminary where I ask hard questions about Christianity and priesthood. Without twenty-first-century answers, I may have to drop out. You can find Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here. This week, I’m attending … Read more
This is the first part of a six-part series about an imaginary journey to an Episcopal seminary where I ask hard questions about Christianity and priesthood. Without twenty-first-century answers, I might have to drop out. I graduated from seminary fifty-eight years ago in a very different world. I started seminary in 1957, when the church … Read more
My class is still charting the twenty-first-century reformation. Getting this reformation off the ground isn’t easy. The biggest obstacle is the image of God as a white man sitting on his throne in his mansion above a flat, three-tiered earth, running everything and judging everyone. Even with photos from the Hubble Space Telescope of at … Read more
I recently learned that Christianity has two WOGs. A few weeks ago, I wrote about the first WOG, which stands for the “Word of God.” I explained that even though the words sound very religious, they don’t mean anything to me because I don’t believe that God wrote the Bible. Human beings wrote it. Maybe … Read more
I read a fun story in the newspaper last week about a congressman who received a lecture from a radio commentator because he confused the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception with the doctrine of the Incarnation—an easy thing to do, since both are total foolishness. One might call the Immaculate Conception and the Incarnation fake … Read more
One of my favorite subscriptions is a weekly called The Spong Newsletter. It’s distributed by ProgressiveChristianity.org, which I suspect is on the Forbidden to Read List for some Christian sects. On March 9, David Felten, a Methodist pastor with a congregation in Fountain Hills, Arizona, published “How to Repeal and Replace Christianity’s Addiction to ‘Fake … Read more
I have never been attracted to science fiction. It’s too far-fetched. I’ve tried to read Harry Potter—three times. By the second chapter, I’ve lost interest. Whenever I hear one of those preposterous stories told in the Bible, I cringe for fear that people will literalize it. For example, all the stories about Jesus’s resurrection, which … Read more
D&D is short for Dogma and Doctrine, which reminds me of a riddle: Why don’t cats go to church? Too much dogma! (Shame on me!) Watch what happens to most of the D&D when the theistic god of yesterday is promoted to encompass the entire universe. One can no longer think about a small Master … Read more