Eclectic Amateur

Angel Update

We have achieved free-swimming status and survived it for the last day! Three cheers for the smallest small fry at the Frey house!

Following a link from Doug’s blog, I find RazorMouth and the essay Victory by Infiltration or Isolation? (“Why the impulse to split is wrong and why staying the course is right”) by P. Andrew Sandlin. I would normally take this as encouragement to stay and fight the good fight within the Episcopal church regarding our current struggles with the “human sexuality” question and (even more profoundly) the wholesale abandonment of the faith in any recognizable form in exchange for Spongian/Jesus Seminar secularist mushiness.

On the other hand, I’m also reading Steve Ray’s book, Upon this Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the Early Church. And it occurs to me: Sandlin’s essay is practically a Catholic apologetic tract. I mean, if it’s a Bad Thing™ to leave and start a new church rather than stay and fight for reform, shouldn’t we apply that same logic to the efforts of Martin Luther and John Calvin?

Still alive; still in the “wriggler” phase. Hopefully, they’ll be freeswimming in a day or two (and not simply become Protein Pills™ for mom and dad).

The new eggs have hatched. “This time for sure!”

… to find that the NEA thinks homeschooling is awful.

I especially love this part:

Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state department of education should be used.

In other words, go ahead and educate your children at home, but you have to do it our way.

I guess they’re just sore because it’s now become news when it’s not a homeschooler that wins the National Spelling Bee. (Congratulations to Pratyush Buddiga on that accomplishment.)

Ah, well. The only thing more I can think to say to this kind of nonsense is to quote my son David: “Na na na na boo-boo!” Will not! So there! Can’t make me!

“Philothea” nails it in an email to the Heart, Mind, and Strength blog:

[T]he wonderful thing about the crisis in the Catholic church (as opposed to the Episcopal church) is that you are simply dealing with sin while we are dealing with heresy.

How true (see Borg, Marcus and Spong, John Shelby). I’m still utterly shocked, appalled, flabbergasted, and yes, scandalized to see Jesus Seminar tripe handed out for consumption by new confirmands:

The purpose of the group is to support and encourage one another as they try to live out their Baptismal Covenant, to explore and challenge their understanding of Christian faith by reading appropriate books, to deepen and strengthen their faith that they might more effectively demonstrate their faith in daily life…

I guess I must be one of those right-brained, analytical types, no doubt caught up in hidebound tradition, because I just can’t get my head around how denying the content of the Creeds (contained within the Baptismal Covenant) can deepen one’s faith.

You know, you’d think that after seven years of fatherhood (and four children!) that I’d have understood this a little bit before now.

But it’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day struggles, that you forget what a gift your children are. And just how much grace we can receive through them.

But today: I am, face it, a grump. I am tired, I am feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders from what I haven’t gotten done at work and at home, and I have more self-pity about this than I know what to do with.

And Andrew, bless him, knows nothing of this. He just knows that Daddy is home. And he laughs, a pure bubbling laugh to cure what ails ya. And smiles at me with his million-dollar smile that says I am full of joy and I love you, Daddy even though it comes out more like “HA-ha! A goo ga ga SQUEAK! HA-ha!”

(After that, how can I mind cleaning the baby food off of his face?)

This is what Grace looks like, transmitted through a 12-month old.

Borg barely makes it to page 3 before tipping his hand that he plans on some serious deconstruction:

Just as the first image of Jesus leads to a fideistic image of the Christian life, so this image leads to a moralistic image of the Christian life. Both images, it seems to me, are inadequate.

Wow, and here I always thought the Christian life had something to do with Faith and Morals.

Not only are they inaccurate as images of the historical Jesus, …

… a debatable assertion among scholars outside of the Jesus Seminar …

… but they lead to incomplete images of the Christian life.

You mean, there’s more than belief and trust in Jesus as Son of God and Savior of the world, and in following His moral teachings as a disciple? Preach it, Brother Borg!

That life is ultimately not about believing or about being good. Rather, as I shall claim, it is about a relationship with God that involves us in a journey of transformation.

Er, transformation into what?

Someone (perhaps his wife, who is an Episcopalian priestess) should inform Prof. Borg that countless Christians throughout the ages have known perfectly well that belief in Christ involves “a journey of transformation”:

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may prove what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

— Romans 12:2 (RSV)

Welcome to “False Dichotomies ‘R’ Us”!

I never thought I’d read Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time again, but my church is using it as a study guide for new adult confirmands(!).

So I guess it’s time to read it again, and prepare to defend the apparantly controversial view that Jesus Seminar material is probably not what we want to use to strengthen the faith of the newly confirmed …

While they say you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, sometime all you should need to know are the reviews on the inside front page:

“He … invites us to look with fresh eyes at the Jesus that the church has distorted in the service of its doctrine and its creeds… I loved this book.
— Rt. Rev. John Shelby Spong, Bishop of Newark

What more should one need to know?

David, unprompted, at dinner last night:

Mommy, these [hamburgers] are lots better than the ones from the drive-through!

Take that, McDonalds!