Tag: spirituality
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Epiphany
Our new interim pastor was out of town because of a death in the family – alas! – so we had a visiting preacher who reminded us of a quotation by Edith Wharton: There are two ways of spreading light: to be The candle or the mirror that reflects it. [The quote is from a…
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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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Wisdom, However Marginal
Britton, William G. Wisdom From the Margins. Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2018. I’ve been reading this [outstanding] book of daily reflections + questions + prayer curated by William G. Britton for a couple of months now, day by day. Reading these quotations and considering these questions may be having an effect on me. It’s hard…
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Exegetical Exercise (Acts 9 10-19)
The Uniform Series passage for Sunday, August 20 is Acts 9:10-19, the last part of the episode of Paul (Saul’s) dramatic conversion experience (or, “conversion” experience, if we follow the new scholarship on Paul, which I do, that holds that Paul never stops “being Jewish,” although he does clearly become a disciple of Jesus, Christ)…
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Palm/Passion Sunday
“Whosoever” That word, “whosoever,” is emphatic: no one is excluded from “whosoever,” it’s unconditional. And I confess, it’s the one forever in my memory of John 3:16, a trace of the King James Version we memorized when I was a little girl: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son,…
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Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
What does it mean, precisely, to be “spiritual but not religious”? Presumably, generally, something relating to the social reality, or maybe more properly the institutional reality, of something that can be called “religion.” But I have been consistently confused about the “spiritual” part of this phrase. What does that word mean? It probably hinges on…
Matters of Interpretation 