CADRE Comments

It's safe to say that many Christians have an ambivalent stance towards paranormal activity. Many Western Christians have been culturally conditioned to posit a stark dichotomy between two realms: the natural world, which they define in terms of the everyday, humdrum, physical reality we experience most of the time, and the supernatural world, more or less limited to God and angels. If they allow for the possibility in our day and age, they take miraculous healings and visions to be signs of God's direct intervention in human affairs, with immediate evidential value in arguing for Christianity. Further along towards the charismatic end of the spectrum, demonic influence and exorcisms may enter the picture. This world-picture is problematized, however, by the fact that seemingly supernatural occurrences, including dramatic healings, visions of the departed, precognitive dreams, etc. are not confined to Christian saints or even Christians in general. In fact, they're not ev...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: see here for the previous entry; and see here for the first entry of the series. (It explains what I'm doing, and how, and contains the Johannine prologue.) The Passing (The storytellers continue in harmony...) Now after they had finished mocking Him, they took off His purple robe and put His garments on Him, and led Him out to crucify. And He went out, bearing the cross for Himself. But as they were going out, they found a man of Kyrene named Simon--the father of Alexander and Rufus (adds the Follower for his audience, who apparently know the boys!)--coming in from the country. They pressed him into service to bear His cross, placing the cross on him to carry behind Jesus. [Plotnote: the Greek for 'cross' is 'stauros'--pole, or stake. The prisoner would not be required to bear a huge plus-sign-looking thing; it would weigh six hundred pounds easily. (Try going outside and lifting a huge limb of wood fallen from a tree during a ...

Introductory note from Jason Pratt: see here for the previous entry; and see here for the first entry of the series. (It explains what I'm doing, and how, and contains the Johannine prologue.) Normally I would put all this material into one book-chapter; but seeing as how it would then be even more lengthy than my other entries before now, I have made provisions to divide it into two uneven halves for posting. The Greater Condemnations (2 days until the end...) (The Follower and the Scholar relate what happened Wednesday in the Temple...) Now Jesus sat down across from the treasury (in the Temple), and looking up He started to watch how the crowds were putting money into the treasury. Now many rich people were putting large sums in as gifts. Yet a poor widow came, and put in two lepta, amounting to a quadran. (1 quadran == 1/64 of a 'daywage' denarius.) And calling His disciples to Him, He is saying to them: "Truly I tell you--this poor widow put in more than all the...