CADRE Comments

This week, the United States will celebrate our annual Independence Day (July 4th -- the day in 1776 we declared, a bit preemptorily, our independence from Great Britain). Freedom and independence are words with great political and cultural meaning for us; and not only for us, but for the numerous nations who (more-or-less following our lead) also declared their independence from sovereign rulers whom they believed were oppressing them, both socially and not-infrequently religiously. Sad to say, Christianity was just-as-not-infrequently the religious oppression the people were revolting against. To some extent this is even true of the United States: even though our own national revolution was grounded on a mixture of orthodox Christianity and nominal deism (such as Franklin’s and Jefferson’s), the history of our country’s settlement in the centuries before the revolution was typically based on fleeing religious (as well as financial) oppression in Europe. And it can ha...

No updates this year to my Cadre Thanksgiving Sermon, so I'll just link back to last year's version . For any readers hoping for yet another massive series between now and Easter: there's one on the way, God willing! But not until Monday, probably. For which other Cadre readers may gladly give thanks. {g}

This is a repost (and slight updating) of an article (sermon, homily, whatever {g}) that I wrote on Thanksgiving 2007 for the Cadre. The original article and its subsequent discussion (on a couple of topics) can be found here. ••••••• “Would you say grace?” someone in my family will ask, to an elder before a family meal--a meal such as Thanksgiving, for instance. Of course what they mean is, “Would you give thanks?” But the phrase in English could be more accurately translated, “Would you say ‘grace’?” In our language, ‘grace’ derives from the same Latin root as Spanish ‘gracias’ or Italian ‘grazie’. Strictly speaking our English word traces back to a Middle English translation of an Old French translation of the Latin {gra_tia} (the long ‘a’ being represented by an underscore here): favor, gratitude, agreeableness. The attitude expressed is one of actively receiving love, in fair-togetherness. In New Testament Greek, however, the word that is typically Englished as ‘grace’ does not h...

This is an apologetics site, not a specifically evangelical one; and relatedly, I tend (and prefer) to write apologetics--defenses and establishments of little pieces here and there, so that real evangelists somewhere else will have a little better soil to work with when spreading the seed for harvest. My recent series (which I'm about half through with) is one such case: despite the meticulous detail, I really have only a dozen or so relatively small points to make with it, compared to the hundreds (or thousands?) which a fully conversant Christian might believe (and which a sceptic might, or must, be prepared to believe in order to profess her loyalty--certainly not to me, but to Someone infinitely greater than I, Whose sandals I am not even fit to untie.) But, do all those things matter? In one sense, no, I don't believe they all matter for some purposes. I think what matters, and so what matters to God--whether now or in any life to come--is this: that a person is willing i...

This is a repost (and slight updating) of an article (sermon, homily, whatever {g}) that I wrote last Thanksgiving for the Cadre. The original article and its subsequent discussion (on a couple of topics) can be found here. ••••••• “Would you say grace?” someone in my family will ask, to an elder before a family meal--a meal such as Thanksgiving, for instance. Of course what they mean is, “Would you give thanks?” But the phrase in English could be more accurately translated, “Would you say ‘grace’?” In our language, ‘grace’ derives from the same Latin root as Spanish ‘gracias’ or Italian ‘grazie’. Strictly speaking our English word traces back to a Middle English translation of an Old French translation of the Latin {gra_tia} (the long ‘a’ being represented by an underscore here): favor, gratitude, agreeableness. The attitude expressed is one of actively receiving love, in fair-togetherness. In New Testament Greek, however, the word that is typically Englished as ‘grace’ does not have...

This week, the United States will celebrate our annual Independence Day (July 4th--the day in 1776 we declared, a bit preemptorily, our independence from Great Britain). Freedom and independence are words with great political and cultural meaning for us; and not only for us, but for the numerous nations who (more-or-less following our lead) also declared their independence from sovereign rulers whom they believed were oppressing them, both socially and (not-infrequently) religiously. Sad to say, Christianity was just-as-not-infrequently the religious oppression the people were revolting against. To some extent this is even true of the United States: even though our own national revolution was grounded on a mixture of orthodox Christianity and nominal deism (such as Franklin’s and Jefferson’s), the history of our country’s settlement in the centuries before the revolution was typically based on fleeing religious (as well as financial) oppression in Europe. And it can hardly be argued th...

“Would you say grace?” someone in my family will ask, to an elder before a family meal--a meal such as Thanksgiving, for instance. Of course what they mean is, “Would you give thanks?” But the phrase in English could be more accurately translated, “Would you say ‘grace’?” In our language, ‘grace’ derives from the same Latin root as Spanish ‘gracias’ or Italian ‘grazie’. Strictly speaking our English word traces back to a Middle English translation of an Old French translation of the Latin {gra_tia} (the long ‘a’ being represented by an underscore here): favor, gratitude, agreeableness. The attitude expressed is one of actively receiving love, in fair-togetherness. In New Testament Greek, however, the word that is typically Englished as ‘grace’ does not have this meaning. Nor does the Hebrew/Aramaic which the New Testament authors were translating or thinking about (typically following the Septuagint). The meaning there is not different in content, exactly, but different in direction: ...

In past months (though not for several weeks now ) I have been posting up chapters from a currently unpublished book of mine (composed back in late 99/early 2000) wherein I work out a progressing synthetic metaphysic, arriving at orthodox Christian belief; and I find I am at a paradoxical point. If I proceed to the end of the section of chapters, I would probably have to continue along with a whole other section of entries concerning redemption and the Incarnation. But while the material has some apologetic value, it doesn’t stand without all the previous argumentation I’ve done in the book--only some of which is reflected in this series of entries. Nor does the further, fifth section involve a historical analysis--a topic far beyond the scope of my work. Meanwhile, there are many other entries I want to be focusing on contributing, including a series building on the progression of points from my first section of chapters (and then eventually on to the second and third, arriving back a...