Religious art, including worship, helps us confront and find meaning in aspects of experience that are not in themselves confrontable or meaningful.
Category: Theology
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is perhaps the most powerful reflection on the crucifixion I know.
We need models of theological and religious conversation that take important questions seriously, but that don’t tell people that they must claim to believe things that they cannot believe.
The Quakers believed that righteousness would emerge from personal conscience; the Puritans believed that righteousness would be enforced (or “cultivated,” in the Unitarian version) by social institutions.
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Malevolent freedom.
Jay N. wrote: I know that malice is usually a second or, more dangerously, a third person perception. Still, I usually experience or see “sin” as having malice as an essential part. Chris Walton, is there a place for malice in your understanding of sin? What an interesting question! I think you are asking in […]
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Tragic freedom.
I think of sin and salvation primarily in terms of tragic contingency and creative freedom.
We should continue doing what we do best — support the integrity of multiple individual paths — while also finding ways to speak coherently and theologically about what enables us to do what we do best.
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‘Retrograde’ theology?
A consensus of contemporaries who choose to ignore their own historical traditions is not a creative evolution over time but a rejection of time.
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Revelation.
For religions that don’t claim revealed status, one still must identify the ultimate source of authority.
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Making it up.
What I don’t hear UUs doing, when they try to define the new religion of Unitarian Universalism, is to speak revelationally, or to offer the sort of charismatic insight that has in the past launched what we now recognize as religions.