Prodigal Kiwi(s) Blog

NT Wright: Christian Origins and the Question of God – Vol # 4

         

Paul and the Faithfulness of God – 2 Vol. by N. T. Wright is due to be released on the 1^st November 2013 

•      First book comprises Parts I and II and front matter
•      Second book has Parts III and IV plus bibliography and indices 

Can be pre-ordered from Amazon, as can Paul and His Recent Interpreters and Pauline Perspectives: Essays on Paul, 1978-2013. The latter two are also to be published and available on the 1st November 2013.

Why are Women more Religious than Men?

A recently published study by Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce focuses on the question “Why are women more religious than men?”

Published on the 20th September 2012 it is profiled in the following way: 

“…Women are more religious than men. Despite being excluded from leadership positions, in almost every culture and religious tradition, women are more likely than men to pray, to worship, and to claim that their faith is important to them. Women also dominate the world of 'New Age' spirituality and are far more superstitious than men. 

This book reviews the now-sizeable body of social research to consider if the gender gap in religion is indeed universal. Marta Trzebiatowska and Steve Bruce extensively critique competing explanations of the differences found. They conclude that the gender gap is not the result of biology but is rather the consequence of important social differences over-lapping and reinforcing each other. Responsibility for managing birth, child-rearing and death, for example, and attitudes to the body, illness and health, each play a part. In the West, the gender gap is exaggerated because the social changes that undermined the plausibility of religion bore most heavily on men first. Where the lives of men and women become more similar, and where religious indifference grows, the gender gap gradually disappears. 

Written in an accessible style whilst drawing some robust conclusions, the book's main purpose is to serve as a state-of-the-art review for those interested in one of the largest differences between male and female behaviour. 

Contents 

1: The Great Divide
2: New Religions
3: Spirits and Bodies
4: New Age and Spirituality
5: Conservative Religion
6: Biology, Roles and Attitudes
7: Risk
8: Ways of Life
9: Secularization
10: The Sum of Small Differences…” 

You can find an excerpt (PDF) – chapter 1 – here. 

The Church of England is “in danger of becoming too clerical and congregationally-based.”

Interesting output from The UK-focused YouGov survey, which Professor Linda Woodhead commissioned to inform the 2013 series of Westminster Faith Debates. Her findings are presented in her article ‘”Nominals” are the Church’s Hidden Strength’ in the current issue (26 April 2013, p. 16) of the Church Times. Sadly, this is only available online to subscribers of the newspaper. 

British Religion in Numbers (BRIN) report: 

“…The analysis proper, which forms the first part of the article, distinguishes four types of Anglicans:

1. Godfearing Churchgoers (5% of Anglicans) – These are Anglicans who attend church, are very certain in their belief in God, and who say that God is the main source of authority in their lives. They are also likely to score highly on other indicators of religiosity (such as prayer and Bible-reading) and to hold conservative views on many issues of personal morality, particularly sexuality (setting them apart with Baptists and Muslims rather than fellow Anglicans).
2. Mainstream Churchgoers (12% of Anglicans) – These have more in common with Non-Churchgoing Believers than with the Godfearers. Apart from their churchgoing, they differ in being a little more religious than Non-Churchgoing Believers on a number of measures and a little more morally conservative.
3. Non-Churchgoing Believers (50% of Anglicans) – These share a good many of the attributes of Mainstream Churchgoers, notwithstanding that they do not attend church. They all believe in God (although some prefer the word Spirit), and significant numbers practise religious or spiritual activities regularly. ‘These “nominals” are more than Anglican in name only: they believe, practise, and identify with Anglicanism.’
4. Non-Churchgoing Doubters (33% of Anglicans) – These Anglicans are also more than merely nominal. Only 15% are outright atheists, most being agnostic or unsure about God, and more than one-fifth claim to practise some religious or spiritual activity in private. They are the most morally permissive of the four groups.

The second half of the article is an impassioned – some may say occasionally idealized – plea for the Church of England to take more seriously non-churchgoing Anglicans in general, and Non-Churchgoing Believers in particular, rather than representing Godfearing Churchgoers as the ‘most real Anglicans’. Woodhead contends that the Church is in danger of becoming too clerical and congregationally-based…” (Emphasis, mine).

Source – here. 

I wonder what data and perspective a similar study of the Anglican Church in New Zealand would produce…?

Seth Godin: The Art of Noticing and Creating

“…The difficult part of seeing is setting aside what you are sure you already know…” 

~ Seth Godin, The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly?. 

I finally caught up with Internet entrepreneur and thought leader Seth Godin’s interview earlier this year on On Being. In the interview Godin is typical Godin and covers a lot of ground. Here’s an excerpt: 

“…Godin: Well, I've never been shy about talking about the professional failure, because I wouldn't trade any of it. After I luckily sold my first little book for not very much money, I then decided I might be able to do that for a living — and got 900 rejection letters in a row. And then for the next seven to 10 years, my company was basically on the verge of bankruptcy the whole time… 

But what [we] all had in common, particularly in the early days, was this sense of, as Brené [Brown] as talked about, being caught out as a fraud and having the world say, you know, we figured you out, and you don't deserve any success. And it's all over. And when you hear that — and so many of us are capable of hearing it just from the slightest negative response, just from the smallest slight — we then decide it's all over. Then the question is, what are you going to do with that feedback? And I think this again goes back to my parents. Because what the habit I developed was that that's not "a no," that's a "no for now." That's not a "this will never work." That's a "this didn't work." But I learned something about what might work for next time. And so there was, you know, the cold fear, the deep emptiness in the pit of your stomach because there's 50 or 100 people who are counting on you to pay them. Or the fact that you've worked on a project for a year or two years or three years, and now it might just be over. And the question is, is that something that we flee from, or is that something that we use to tell us that we're alive?...” 

You can find the interview here.

From Blaming to Forgiving

“…Our most painful suffering often comes from those who love us and those we love.  The relationships between husband and wife, parents and children, brothers and sisters, teachers and students, pastors and parishioners - these are where our deepest wounds occur.  Even late in life, yes, even after those who wounded us have long since died, we might still need help to sort out what happened in these relationships. The great temptation is to keep blaming those who were closest to us for our present, condition saying:  "You made me who I am now, and I hate who I am."  The great challenge is to acknowledge our hurts and claim our true selves as being more than the result of what other people do to us.  Only when we can claim our God-made selves as the true source of our being will we be free to forgive those who have wounded us…” 

~ Henri Nouwen.

Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life

The April 2013 issue of The Way journal (the journal of the British Jesuits) featured an article by Harvey D. Egan titled: The Mystical Theology of Karl Rahner. Egan bases it on a longer treatment in chapter 3 of a book I’m reading at present Karl Rahner: Mystic of Everyday Life. 

Here’s an excerpt from the journal article 

“…Rahner offers common human experiences to help us ‘dig ... out from under the rubbish of everyday experience’ real life occurrences of grace, such as accepting with hope the experience of utter loneliness; forgiving with no expectation of the other’s gratitude or even of feeling good about one’s selflessness; being utterly faithful to the depths of one’s conscience, even when taken as a fool; praying, even when it feels useless; maintaining faith, hope and love, even when there are no apparent reasons for so doing; experiencing bitterly the great gulf between what we desire from life and what it actually gives us; and silently hoping in the face of death. God is experienced, in Rahner’s view, most clearly and intensely... where the graspable contours of our everyday realities break and dissolve; where failures of such realities are experienced; when lights which illuminate the tiny islands of our everyday life go out…” 

You can read the complete article (PDF) here. 

Working Together

We shape our self 

to fit this world 

and by the world 

are shaped again. 

The visible 

and the invisible 

working together 

in common cause, 

to produce 

the miraculous. 

I am thinking of the way 

the intangible air 

passed at speed 

round a shaped wing 

easily 

holds our weight. 

So may we, in this life 

trust 

to those elements 

we have yet to see 

or imagine, 

and look for the true 

shape of our own self 

by forming it well 

to the great 

intangibles about us.

 

~ David Whyte ~

 

(From House of Belonging)

KINDNESS

Before you know what kindness really is 


you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment 
like salt in a weakened broth.


What you held in your hand,


what you counted and carefully saved,


all this must go so you know


how desolate the landscape can be


between the regions of kindness.


How you ride and ride


thinking the bus will never stop,


the passengers eating maize and chicken


will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,


you must travel where the


Indian in a white poncho lies dead


by the side of the road.


You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night


with plans and the simple breath


that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness


as the deepest thing inside,


you must know sorrow


as the other deepest thing.


You must wake up with sorrow.


You must speak to it till your voice


catches the thread of all sorrows


and you see the size of the cloth.


Then it is only kindness


that makes sense anymore,


only kindness that ties your shoes


and sends you out into the day


to mail letters and purchase bread,


only kindness that raises its head


from the crowd of the world to say


it is I you have been looking for,


and then goes with you every where


like a shadow or a friend.

 




~Naomi Shihab Nye~

Uncomfortableness, a Necessity for Growth

“…No matter what your type, remember that we must be willing to be uncomfortable for a while if we wish to be released from whatever has bound us…” 

- Understanding the Enneagram, p. 361. 

Faith (In)Culture

“…My contention is that there is no single way in which Christian faith relates and ought to relate to culture as a whole. The relation between faith and culture is too complex for that. Faith stands in opposition to some elements of culture and is detached from others. In some aspects faith is identical with elements of culture, and it seeks to transform in diverse ways yet many more. Moreover, faith’s stance toward culture changes over time as culture changes. How, then, is the stance of faith toward culture defined? It is—or it ought to be—defined by the center of the faith itself, by its relation to Christ as the divine Word incarnate and the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world… 

… Since the world is God’s creation and since the Word came to his own even if his own did not accept him (John 1:11), the proper stance of Christians toward the larger culture cannot be that of unmitigated opposition or whole-scale transformation. A much more complex attitude is required—that of accepting, rejecting, learning from, transforming, and subverting or putting to better uses various elements of an internally differentiated and rapidly changing culture…” 

Miroslav Volf from here, via Len.