Month: June 2017
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Imagination and the Problem of Evil
When I was a little girl, Haley Mills was the designated Disney movie star of the day. I adored Hayley Mills. I saw every Hayley Mills movie ever made during those years in the 60s, and what I wanted more than anything was nothing less than to be Hayley Mills. In whatever movie I had […]
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Christian Doctrine (9)
Summary notes and comments on Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr., Christian Doctrine Chapter 9, “Why Doesn’t God Do Something About it? – The Doctrine of Providence and Evil”: The doctrine of providence is related to the doctrine of creation. Not only does God create everything that is, but God provides for it – taking care of […]
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Exegetical Exercise (Exodus 3:1-12)
The Uniform Series text for Sunday, July 2, is Exodus 3:1-12 – a portion of the text that’s often short-handed as “the call of Moses.” Here’s the text (in Inclusive Bible version), and my notes on it: 1/ Moses was leading the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian. Leading the flock deep […]
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Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time
The text today continues the exploration of God’s call in the book of Judges, with the call of Samson – although the call is more properly, as we’ll see, the call of Samson’s mother. Scripture doesn’t tell us her name, but we know she must have had one, and according to Jewish tradition it was […]
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Thoughts on a definition of idolatry
Something caught my attention in Guthrie’s definition of idolatry as “giving absolute loyalty to something that is only a creature rather than the Creator.”1 It occurred to me that the definition provides a good opening for arguing that the practices of Hindu puja, that are so involved with representations of the many, many, many gods […]
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Christian Doctrine (8)
Although the exam on theology is in the past now (passed it – yay!), I was thinking that now that hip replacement/rehab AND spring semester teaching are ALSO in the past I could turn back to the project of annotating my copy of Shirley C. Guthrie, Jr., Christian Doctrine Rev. ed., (Louisville: Westminster John Knox […]
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Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time
The text for this sermon (the Uniform Series text for June 18) is the beginning of the story of Jephthah, one of the Judges, whose story is told in chapters 11 and 12 of the book of Judges. We are continuing our study of “call stories” in the book of Judges with this text; this […]
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Exegetical Exercise (Judges 11:4-11, 29-31)
The Uniform Series text for Sunday, June 18 is a section from Judges 11, the portion of the story of Jephthah where the elders of Gilead convince Jephthah to lead them in the fight against Ammon, and Jephthah’s vow. Here’s the text: 4/ After a time the Ammonites made war against Israel. 5/ And when […]
Matters of Interpretation 