God Is Not 3 Guys

In the name of the Mother and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. In the name of the Father, and of the Daughter, and of the Holy Spirit. In the name of Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. [creator, preserver, dissolver/restorer] In the name of Isis, Osiris, and Horus. In the name of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. In the name of Juno, Artemis, and Hecate. Religions are full of trinities. Our speech is full of trinities. Ever notice it? I do because I’m a writer and notice the tendency to group in threes. Reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. “I came, I saw, I conquered.” Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again. Ours is a three-dimensional universe with height, width, and depth in space; past, present and future in time; and three states of matter—solid, liquid, and gas. Scientists now think there are universes with different sets of dimensions that we can’t fathom because our minds are shaped and limited by certain constraints of our minds (thus Immanuel Kant ). Because th...

JannAldredge-Clanton has published books of inclusive hymns for use in Christian worship. I invited her to write a guest blogpost.    Jeanette The words we sing and speak in worship matter. Words carry great power to contribute either to the Good News of peace and justice or to support unjust systems.  In worship, words carry power because of the sacred value given to them; their power shapes belief and action.  Combined with music, words become embedded in the memory of singers.  I can recite from memory all stanzas of most songs in the hymnal used in the church where I grew up, but I have little recall of the sermons.  Christians should care about the names and images we use for Deity because our sacred symbols reflect and shape our deepest values.  When our names for divinity are exclusively male, we give greatest worth to men. If we truly believe that women are equal, then we must include female names and images of Deity in our worship.  Bu...

May 9, 2014 Cardinal Gerhard Müller: Since Barbara Marx Hubbard addressed the Assembly on this topic two years ago, every issue of your newsletter has discussed Conscious Evolution in some way. . . . futuristic ideas advanced by the proponents of Conscious Evolution are not actually new. The Gnostic tradition is filled with similar affirmations . . . Müller questioned if their programs were promoting heresy . LCWR states in reply: We do not recognize ourselves in the doctrinal assessment of the conference . . .  We experienced . . . genuine interaction and mutual respect. . . . LCWR was saddened to learn that impressions of the organization in the past decades have become institutionalized in the Vatican . . . LCWR builds on Pope John Paul II.   Long fascinated by science, he had the Vatican begin a process that would eventually lead to a statement in 1992 admitting church officials had erred in condemning Galileo. . . . …. The Leadership Conference of ...

Life includes death The opposite of life is not death, the opposite of death is rebirth. Life has no opposite. Carl Moschkau To continue Carl’s meditation, death is part of life, and we experience little deaths every day—losses, failures, and disappointments that can spur us to be transformed. Life is a series of changes and each change is a little death and resurrection. Christians and other non-materialists have confidence that the final death of the body we presently inhabit does not mean the end of us. It is a rebirth, the beginning of a new life. Eleusinian Mysteries Before the life of Christ modeled the dying and rising motif central to every human life, the myths of non-Christian religions played it out. For close to two thousand years the most revered religious rites among Greeks and, for some centuries the Romans, were the Eleusinian Mysteries, which commemorated events in the lives of Demeter and Persephone. This divine Mother and Daughter pair prefigured the Father and Son d...

Half  the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn has more practical suggestions for transforming the world than any other book I know. It is painful to read. The first chapters are so packed with excruciating information, “the brutality inflicted routinely on women and girls in much of the world,” I could stand to read only small chunks at a time. Its detailed evidence of sexual violence against women and girls—honor killings, bride beating, bride burning, genital cutting, forced prostitution, rape as a tactic of war, acid to disfigure, and selling of 7- and 8-year-old girls into sexual slavery—tells us that gender violence and discrimination is the paramount human rights problem of our time. Indeed, it tells us that nothing would do more to ameliorate the problems of the world than raising the status of women. I say it’s painful, but you will read Half  the Sky easily, with absorbed attention, because thes...

We got into a discussion about church-going at my writers group meeting. Like Jean ( scroll down 2 posts ), my writer friends are comfortable calling themselves “cafeteria Catholics” and the Presbyterian-Lutheran talks about “Presbolutheranism.” Another self-description I heard is “free thinkers.” Most of us continue going to church despite having grown past the childhood beliefs taught in church-talk. We do it because we have a spiritual orientation and Catholic services are “home.” Among my closest Catholic friends and acquaintances, what a priest, bishop, or pope says gets the same critical scrutiny as the words of a politician. My son and daughter left the church during their last years in high school, and I never had any qualms about it because I could see that their spiritual journey didn’t require it. In fact, my respect for them and for other young people rises if they ask intelligent questions about religion and leave the Church. But once in a while I meet parents who feel ...

When I was in third grade I wanted to be a third grade teacher. In fourth grade I wanted to be a fourth grade teacher, and so on up the grades. The top grades of high school were as far as I dared go with these aspirations. College was a must for me in spite of the fact that my oldest siblings weren’t allowed to go to high school. In retrospect, my matriculating for college seems almost unbelievable. Where did that daring come from? At the time I couldn’t imagine life without college; it would have been the end of life for me. Young people will not understand what a big deal this was. It was 1961, before the counter-cultural revolution; the only post-college careers for women were teaching and social work. In my totally-Catholic world, the only women in college got there by joining a religious order. My dad, a farmer born shortly after the turn to the twentieth century, was certain that his children didn’t need more education than he did—eight grades. Because he did well, didn’t he? ...