(Source: thetithingman, via revnaomiking)
Where Is My Faith Community?
Where is my faith community? My faith community is wherever I can gather with a few others (or a huge number of others) and reorient myself to the Holy, to the transforming work and power of love, to gratitude, generosity, and wonder.
Sometimes that might be in a building. More often, I meet my faith community from known and beloved members to strangers and even enemies out in the realm of social media. We use these easy, accessible tools throughout each night and day to learn faithfully, pray, encourage, worship, and work together in faithful service.
Faith communities are about attention, intention, action, and devotion. We use all kinds of ways to come together as people of faith. Social media is just one of the terrific possibilities for us to join in creating shorter-term & enduring faith communities. These can grow from, serve inside, and exist apart from faith communities that choose the powerful
suite of tools related to buildings.
"Community is not possible without the willingness to forgive one another “seventy-seven times” (see Matthew 18:22). Forgiveness is the cement of community life. Forgiveness holds us together through good and bad times, and it allows us to grow in mutual love. But what is there to forgive or to ask forgiveness for? As people who have hearts that long for perfect love, we have to forgive one another for not being able to give or receive that perfect love in our everyday lives. Our many needs constantly interfere with our desire to be there for the other unconditionally. Our love is always limited by spoken or unspoken conditions. What needs to be forgiven? We need to forgive one another for not being God!"
— Henri Nouwen (via azspot)
(via azspot)
NASA’s 64-megapixel photo of Earth | The Verge
“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.’” - Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14 astronaut, People magazine, 8 April 1974.
(via shaneguiter)
Happy Martin Luther King Day :-)
Click here for an article on Martin Luther King by a Kadampa nun.
(via thebuddhayouknow)
"The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith."
— Abraham Heschel (via azspot)
(via azspot)
"Being Christian is like being black. It’s a paradox. You grow up. You wonder why they treat you like that. And yet at the same time my mother and daddy told me ‘don’t hate like they hate. If you do, you will self-destruct. Hate only kills the hater, not the hated.’ It was their faith that gave them the resources to transcend the brutality and see the real beauty. It’s a mystery. It’s a mystery how African-Americans, after two and half centuries of slavery, another century of lynching and Jim Crow segregation, still come out loving white people. Now, most white people don’t think I love them, but I do. They always feel strange when I say that. You see, the deeper the love, the more the passion, especially when the one you love hurt you. Your brothers and sisters, and yet they treat you like the enemy. The paradox is, is that in spite of all that, African-Americans are the only people who’ve never organized to take down this nation. We have fought. We have given our lives. No matter what they do to us we still come out whole. Still searching for meaning. I think the resources for that are in the culture and in the religion that is associated with that. That faith and that culture, it was the blues of the spiritual, that faith and that culture gives African-Americans a sense that they are not what white people say they are."
— James Cone (via azspot)
(via azspot)
Maketh All Things New
As we look to the year stretching ahead of us, we can be certain of uncertainty. The way we relate to each other is our best bet in terms of preparing for a future we can’t yet know. In this regard, Unitarian Universalism has some things in common with the World Wide Web. This sermon was delivered to the UUs of Fallston on January 8, 2012.
I love this analogy!
The Bible as Thomas Jefferson Read Jesus’ Life
by Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Six years before his death in 1826, Thomas Jefferson constructed a text for his own personal library, which he often read each night for 30 minutes to an hour before bedtime. The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth — commonly referred to as The Jefferson Bible — is a compendium of clippings from the four gospels of the New Testament. The former president and author of the Declaration of Independence cut passages from six texts composed in four languages — English, French, Greek, and Latin — and pasted them in separate columns, side by side, so that he could study and compare the different translations.
The 77-year-old Deist believed Jesus’ life and teachings to be “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.” But Jefferson was a product of the Enlightenment and was skeptical of the four authors of the Gospels. He intended to tell a chronological version of Jesus’ life, eliminating the passages that appeared “contrary to reason.”
There’s no resurrection story at the closing of Jefferson’s Bible; the tomb is shut.
As outlined in the video above, Jefferson’s Bible has undergone a meticulous conservation process and is now being displayed through May 28, 2012 at the Albert Small Documents Gallery in the National Museum of American History in Washington D.C. If you can’t make the trip, or even if you can, be sure to check out the online exhibition, which provides high-quality, zoomable photographic images of each of the 84 pages of The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. And they’re all transcribed too!
Attention UUs!
What an amazing resource!
