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Showing posts from June, 2019

Beyond Parochial Faith

My memoir, Beyond Parochial Faith: A Catholic Confesses is now available at  http://jeanetteblonigenclancy.com/beyond-parochial-faith   Six years ago, a woman rang my doorbell and said she walked a mile to tell me that my book, God Is Not Three Guys in the Sky: Cherishing Christianity without Its Exclusive Claims, had a profound effect on her. Its subversion of common Christian belief seemed undeniable but left her bereft. She asked me to write a sequel for persons like herself who wonder, “If not Christianity, then what?” Beyond Parochial Faith offers some answers . My fire-of-purification story traces my evolving views of religions and spirituality, culminating in faith I call “secular.” It weaves together strands of my life—alcoholic husband and mid-life meltdown, judgmental siblings and prudish aunts, Carl Jung and Father-Son myth, the Goddess and the historical Jesus, lord-gods and sexual abuse, atheists and naïve seminarians, Teilhard de Chardin and quantum theory,

Intrigued by 4th Gospel

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JFK & Mary Magdalene, May 10, 2019 John F. Kennedy won the Pulitzer Prize for  Profiles in Courage . The book deserved the honor but not the purported author. Kennedy did conceive the idea and some of the content, but he did none of the research or writing. Most of that was done by Theodore Sorenson, whom Kennedy called his “research assistant.” Sorenson is the one who gave the book its “drama and flow,” according to historian Herbert Parmet. Ted Sorenson was essentially the  ghostwriter of  Profiles in Courage .  I see a parallel in the gospel I call the “Fourth Gospel” instead of the “Gospel of John.” Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do not really name authors of the gospels. Each of these gospel names, for various reasons, developed while the gospels were being passed around. They became convenient tags for identifying and discussing the gospels, but they are not the authors’ names. “John” was thought to be the only real name of the Fourth Gospel, because John is named at the