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 fourth 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, and Part 3 here. This week, I’m attending my first class … Read more
This is the third 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 and Part 2 here. I am attending my first New Testament class to … Read more
This is the second 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. Last week, I attended an imaginary class about prayer and prayer life. I asked … 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
“Are you a Christian?” is a question I hear often because I label myself as an a-theist. That means I don’t believe in an anthropomorphic god living in a mansion above a flat earth. My answer to whether I’m a Christian is more complex than a simple yes or no. If someone asked, “Do you … Read more
I have never been poor—short on money, yes. I barely scraped by in college. After college, I enlisted in the Marine Corps, hoping to be selected for the Officers Candidate School. As a private, I made $73 a month, or $2.39 a day. After I was ordained, I worked in the mission field for $2,400 … Read more
Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Or is this a fairy tale? This issue, along with who God is, could keep the twenty-first-century reformation from moving forward. Progressive thinking is often considered heresy because it questions doctrines such as a god living above us or physical resurrections. A dead man coming back to life … 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
As reported in last week’s blog post, the people in my Charting the Twenty-First-Century Reformation class and I are combatting the anthropomorphization of God (giving him human qualities) by renaming this power or force Creation or the Ground of All Being or Higher Power. This creates a huge problem for the institutional church, which has … Read more