Imagine the Quaker
an erstwhile mirror site for weblog on newquaker.com
archives | newquaker.comSaturday, July 26, 2003
Well, America Online has finally notified me that it is getting ready to release its new AOL version, called AOL 9.0® Optimized. So I guess now they will be packing the post offices and retail outlets with more CDs—no doubt right next to the remaining, uncollected CDs of the recent AOL 8.0®. I recommend that you collect all the CDs you can and send them to the guys at nomoreaolcds.com, a website dedicated to ending the needless environmental trash created by AOL's wasteful marketing strategy. Here's why they are doing this:
"We represent all who are sick of receiving unwanted AOL cds. By sending us your unwanted AOL, Netscape, or CompuServe cds, you can help us make a statement. Once we have 1,000,000 collected, we will make our quest across America to give them all back to their rightful owner, AOL and say "stop doing this". Don't throw them away or get mad, send 'em to us and we'll all end this wasteful practice while sharing a laugh or two."
So far they have collected 199,342. They need 800,658 more to make it to 1 million CDS. Do your part and send those AOL CDs to nomoreaolcds.com.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 2:07 AM
Friday, July 25, 2003
What makes the body of Christ a cohesive unity throughout time, from one age to the next, is the Holy Spirit's ability to personalize the Gospel for each person, for each family, for each generation—to enable all who are called to have an authentic, experimental encounter with our Lord. Standing alongside this (sometimes aiding the Spirit's gift, sometimes standing in opposition to it) is our psychosocial need to maintain customs and traditions: thus we have liturgies, hymnals, processionals, vestments, pastoral systems, priestly orders, complex bureaucratic hierarchies in church structures, canonical disputations, books of discipline, heresy trials, and attempts to quick-freeze Scripture, as in long-standing debates over the primacy of the King James Version among English speakers.
The need for customs and traditions will of course always be with us, and it is good that we are so inclined—without this, each generation would no legacy, no record of prior religious conventions; each person would not have a human tradition to rely on for historical and ecclesiastical support, and each experience of the Gospel, one's personal encounter with the Holy Spirit, would always be without precedent, outside of a historical continuum of experience with God's grace, and could therefore not support our empirical need for historical confirmation of the whole of our Christian tradition. Customs and traditions enable each age to engender for the next a meaningful experience of God's grace: those experiences, because personal within a purposeful context, can therefore personalize the Christian tradition.
However, when we cling to customs and traditions—struggling, for example, to maintain the sameness of worship forms and Scripture—we end up impeding the Spirit. We then turn something living into an inanimate thing, rendering our experience of Christ an empty icon. Perhaps this is why at some point in time all orthodox churches and even mainline churches within the evangelical tradition face a bifurcation of doctrine—on the one side incorporating within their credos the very secular cultural in which they find themselves or, on the other side, rigidly settling upon a discipline and liturgy that eventually garrote the living, changing Spirit of Christ within the corporate body of believers. Such are the United Methodist Church in the US and the Coptic Church, just two examples of church bodies that have taken the split path.
Only the periodic renewal of the Spirit within the corporate church is able to move the real mainstream of God's living grace from one person to another, from one family to the next, from one generation to what follows. But that means helping Christians along a Spirit-led path that is often not well-traveled.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 3:40 PM
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
For vacation last week, I drove my Jeep from New York to Florida for a visit with family and friends. For both the drive to Florida and back, I was forced to ponder the question of civilization. I don't mean what is civilization, but rather why civilization. Rousseau thought about it, so it's an old question, going back at least as far as the European Enlightenment, where we are first given the modern "idea of progress." That was J.B. Bury's thesis in The Idea of Progress (1920), in which he traces that idea to the social theorists Fontenelle, Condorcet, and Comte.
If you make the 2,400 mile round-trip journey I made—from the Central New York's innocent charm to the garish adulteration of Florida's natural beauty at the hands of many zealous developers—you too will question, I think, whether our American civilization is really going anywhere. You will also ask, as I did, whether our dense cities, wide suburbs, cars, jobs, and buy-it-now-on-credit lifestyles are really any improvement over the simpler life of the native American Indian. In fact, without the idea of progress, there seems not to be any point (purpose, aim, end, goal) to the serious, fast, often zany, sleep-deprived American lifestyle. Of course, the author of Ecclesiastes already said that, although in different words, but then what did he know?
Dear Heavenly Father, thank you for giving to us America's beautiful and bountiful natural resources and the rich abundance of opportunities to do with them either good or bad. Lead us to develop the good, forgive us for the bad, our many mistakes, and direct our hearts to a simpler reliance on your Spirit and not on the false promises of progress and civilization without purpose. In the name of your Son, Jesus, we pray this. Amen.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 3:35 AM
Lies, damned lies. The issue over who really knew what about Saddam Hussein's interest in uranium from the west African country of Niger (what Arianna Huffington calls "Yellowcake-gate") is only relevant to President Bush's ignominious desertion in the face of a real need to be accountable for what he said to the American public in his 2003 State of the Union address. Instead of accepting responsibility for his assertions, he is letting CIA Director George Tenet and now deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley take the blame for allowing the bogus uranium connection to remain in the speech. And therefore he is telling us that he is not answerable for what he says in his public addresses: he merely reads what others write for him to read. Americans deserve a better person to lead this country. Let us remember this when we are called upon to vote in the next presidential election.
posted by Merle Harton, Jr. 2:11 AM
© Merle Harton, Jr. All rights reserved. Biblical references are NIV® unless otherwise noted.
