Tag: communication
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Modern Day Prophecy
Pew Research Center has published their detailed report Beyond Red and Blue: The Political Typology. The way I read it, it’s discouraging. It’s not obvious to me that the people this survey is about – us, that is – have the tools we need and the skills we need to do the things we would…
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An Evidence Problem
Professor Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True, recently asked the people of faith who correspond with him from time to time to say what evidence they would accept for the non-existence or non-reality of God. His point is that he’s able to say what evidence he would accept for the existence or reality…
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Beyond the Jargon of Sentimentality
There must be a way to talk about Jesus Christ that is not nauseating and off-putting and meaningless. That’s real and honest and qualifies as communication. That rings true as a message for actual humans, who live here in this world. Surely. Image: NOAA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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Speaking of Intersectionality
Never had thought about this before, but the Canaanite Woman (Matthew 15:21-28) would be an example of “intersectionality.” Our pastor pointed this out last week. OK, more precisely, an example of “someone in an intersectional position.” Because the Canaanite Woman is, obviously, a woman. This meant something in the first century Mediterranean world – in…
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Conditions for Communication
If you speak to people in words they don’t understand, how will they know what you are saying? You might as well be talking into empty space. There are many different languages in the world, and every language has meaning. But if I don’t understand a language, I will be a foreigner to someone who…
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Help with Difficult Conversations
Stone, Douglas, Patton, Bruce, and Heen, Sheila. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. 10th Anniversary Edition. Penguin, 1999. [An Installment of the “Read Me” Project.] These reflections on Difficult Conversations are not a commentary on Christmas with the family. It’s a pure coincidence that I got Difficult Conversations on loan from one of…
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Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time
Our preacher of the day told us he was 12 years old before he realized that not all old people had Dutch accents. Up till then, he’d more or less assumed that people just started to talk that way as they aged, since all the grandparent-aged people he knew had Dutch accents. Because he grew…
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Third Sunday in Lent
[“The Humble Questioner,” a sermon for First Unitarian Church, Louisville, Sunday, March 24.] I come from a tradition in which it’s customary to prepare a sermon as a reflection on a text – so here’s one text – it’s a little proverb, actually, that according to tradition was collected by one of the wisest people…
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Love as a Second Language
Gary Chapman. The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts. Chicago: Northfield Publishing, 2015 (1992). [An installment of the Read Me Project.] To be completely honest, The 5 Love Languages never quite made it to the “Read Me” shelf. It was on display in the back of Barnes and Noble, on the way…
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“Messaging”
More and more, I read and hear people ridiculing a cluster of “postmodern” ideas: that “reality is socially constructed,” that “language is a political power-play,” that rhetoric molds passionate intensity and conviction along with it. Denying the socially-constructed quality of social reality, and the element of power-play in the meaning of words, seems to have…
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Kinds of Outreach
True story: Saturday was Louisville Pride Festival on Bardstown Road. Louisville Gay Men’s Chorus opened the musical side of the festival with the Star Spangled Banner and other opening songs, and VOICES of Kentuckiana sang right afterwards, so I was there in the back row trying to sing newish-to-me music after having been out on…
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Trinity Sunday
[A sermon on the Uniform Series text for June 11, which is also Trinity Sunday in the liturgical year.] The text for the morning is Judges 6:11-18, the beginning of the story of Gideon’s call. Gideon lives in the time of the “judges,” and is one of the heroes who step in and restore some…
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Thoughts on God’s Will
Friends of mine have invoked the theme of God’s will to condemn the demonstrations that have occurred in the past several days in the wake of the recent election. I don’t know that they have Calvin’s doctrine of providence in mind when they say this; maybe they are just thinking about Romans 13:1-10, which counsels…
Matters of Interpretation 