I love Bluegrass and Oldtime Gospel. I put up a lot of these songs on my facebook page now. This kind of music played a role in my rediscovery of traditional faith as a twenty year old in the early seventies. I had been very religious as a child. I was a devoted altar boy and when I was thirteen I made a 50 mile pilgrimage on foot to a shrine. Like a lot of young people I began to question and my questions were not treated kindly. I also discovered what the famous children’s writer Madeline L’Engle called the perfidy of adults who were my elders in religion. I lost my faith. Years later I studied faith development and found that some researchers in the field spoke of what they called the atheism of the twelve year old. I was stuck in the atheism of the twelve year old until about age 20.
Archive for June, 2009
Sacred Songs
Friday, June 19th, 2009The Emergent Church
Sunday, June 7th, 2009Reflections On The Emerging Church
After The Trinity Ancient Wisdom-Anglican Futures Conference
By The Rev. Leander S. Harding, Ph.D.
We just had a really stimulating conference here at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge PA on the relationship between what is called The Emerging Church and the Great Tradition and what role Anglicanism plays now and could play in the future with this new movement in the church. The Emergent Church is a term that characterizes a wide spectrum of Christians and churches often composed of young adults that are seeking an “ancient-future” way of being the church. These young Christians often come out of Evangelical and Pentecostal circles, though there are refugees from the Mainline Churches as well, and they are looking for something more significant than the trendy consumerist relevance that has characterized many of the approaches to reaching a secularized society in the Twentieth Century. It is a very disparate movement and includes examples that resonate deeply with the orthodoxy of the ages and other examples that seem, as one of the conference presenters George Sumner said, the latest installment in the long book of Gnosticism. (In fact a book I would recommend for self described emergent types is Against the Protestant Gnostics by Phillip J. Lee.)
One of Dr. Deming’s Students On The Big Three
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009One of the great privileges of recent years was the invitation to participate as a scholarship student in a seminar on the thought of the famous quality expert and managment philosopher W. Edwards Deming. One the instructors was the statistician Gypsie Ranney. Here is a recent reflection of hers on the fate of the Big Three. It is interesting that it was written before the GM Bankruptcy. It doesn’t take much translation to apply some of these insights to the crisis that mainline churches are experiencing.