This is a rather nice post from Richard Beck: is the way to emulate Benedictine spirituality to make an extra half-hour for prayer, or to do the dishes?

This is the best visual evocation I have ever seen of the state of the mainline churches in the USA, and in particular, of my denomination. (Image credit to The Curate's Desk)

 This is a wonderful statement, I think:

On all interesting matters, the witness of the Bible is complex – on many it can appear contradictory. God is sovereign, but human beings are free to chose as they will; Jesus is one with the Father, but says ‘the Father is greater than I’; God created all things good, but the world is broken by the power of evil; a final judgement and separation will come, but God will be all-in-all, and every knee will bow; the list could go on and on…Theology is the task of coping with such complexity,

On Sunday (Mar 4) the first lectionary reading is Genesis 22, Abraham and Isaac. Today (Mar 2) a new Arcade Fire song on the same theme surfaced, called "Abraham's Daughter."  Whoa. I've been listening to it nonstop, and I still can't quite tell what happens at the end, but it is extremely intense. Lyrics:

Some good Lenten thoughts from this brief e-book by my current temp-boss:

We are capable of ruining almost anything. Give us the Law, and we will make it oppressive. Give us a prophet and we will applaud until it looks like he might just be successful, and then we will kill him. Give us a temple and we will burn it to the ground. Tell us how to love and we will use the words as one more way to lie about our motives, and say we love when we mean that we want sex, feel guilty, or have something else up our sleeves.

(As will become obvious, identifying details have been changed. This basic thing happened here once, but I'm not saying when or with whom. Conversations are real.)

We had a run of great weather here over the week when the local branch of One Famous Evangelistic Network were doing their first student camp of the year. To find a local project for all the young people, OFEN enlisted a few churches from nearby towns who chose, as churches often do, to target our neighborhood -- tragic and needy as everyone thinks we are -- for an outreach event. We learned of this one afternoon when a mob of late-teens in green OFEN4Jesus t-shirts came down the street putting flyers in mailboxes. I went out on the porch to watch. Soon a resident mentioned to them, perhaps a little testily, that it was a federal crime to put a flyer in his mailbox, whereupon the late-teens in green OFEN4Jesus t-shirts came back down the street removing all their flyers from the mailboxes.

Today at the church where I've been helping out, I had what I believe was the worst (or best, depending on your perspective) experience in my life of a couple of clergy becoming incapacitated with laughter at the altar.  I don't think it would really translate for a general audience, but let's just say it involved heirloom silver, gluten-free wafers, and an acolyte vaulting the altar rail. One of those moments when an Eastward-facing (back to the congregation) setup just absolutely saves your life.

"[T]his tendency we have in our political culture to blacklist people is appalling, anti-democratic, and anti-intellectual. You never learn anything from 95 percent of the people you see on television, or 90 percent of the people you read in the papers. Why not? Because they are safe. On both the left and the right, we have become a nation of pathetic babies who cannot stand to hear a considered opinion that violates our own personal orthodoxies. We rarely allow our own ideas to be tested, because to be compelled to hear the dissenting views of others hurts our feelings." -Rod Dreher

Mark Noll, “Scots’ Form in the Suburbs”

The sedentary Presbyterians
awoke, arose, and filed to tables spread
with white, to humble bits that showed how God
almighty had decided to embrace
humanity, and why these clean, well-fed, 
well-dressed suburbanites might need his grace.

The pious cruel, the petty gossipers
and callous climbers on the make, the wives
with icy tongues and husbands with their hearts
of stone, the ones who battle drink and do
not always win, the power lawyers mute
before this awful bar of mercy, boys
uncertain of themselves and girls not sure
of where they fit, the poor and rich hemmed in
alike by cash, physicians waiting to
be healed, two women side by side—the one
with unrequited longing for a child,
the other terrified by signs within
of life, the saintly weary weary in
pursuit of good, the academics (soft
and cossetted) who posture over words, 
the travelers coming home from chasing wealth
or power or wantonness, the mothers
choked by dual duties, parents nearly crushed
by children died or children lost, and some
with cancer-ridden bodies, some with spikes
of pain in chest or back or knee or mind
or heart. They come, O Christ, they come
to you.

They came, they sat, they listened to the words,
“for you my body broken.” Then they ate
and turned away—the spent unspent, the dead
recalled, a hint of color on the psychic
cheek—from tables groaning under weight
of tiny cups and little crumbs of bread.

And to close John Donne Week, the famous passage where he addresses today's Anglican bloggers. Well, not really. 

To this Man, every Wheele is a Drumme, and every Drumme a Thunder, and every Thunderclapp a dissolution of the whole frame of the World : If there fall a broken tyle from the house, hee thinkes Foundations are destroyed ; if a crazie woman, or a disobedient childe, or a needie servant fall from our Religion, from our Church, hee thinkes the whole Church must necessarily fall...

[We are justified to lament that] there should be such Exasperations, such Exacerbations, such Vociferations, such Ejulations, such Defamations of one another, as if all Foundations were destroyed. Who would not tremble, to heare those Infernall words, spoken by men, to men, of one and the same Religion fundamentally, as Indiabolificata, Per-diabolificata, and Super diabolificata, that the Devill, and all the Devills in Hell, and worse then the Devill is in their Doctrine, and in their Divinitie -- when, God in heaven knowes, if their owne uncharitablenesse did not exclude him, there were roome enough for the Holy Ghost, on both and on either side, in those Fundamentall things, which are unanimely professed by both.

And yet every Mart, wee see more Bookes written by these men against one another, then by them both, for Christ.

Again, remarkably contemporary:

Such a church there is; a Jordan to wash thine original leprosy in baptism ; a city upon a mountain, to enlighten thee in the works of darkness; a continual application of all that Christ Jesus said, and did, and suffered, to thee. Let no soul say, she can have all this at God's hands immediately, and never trouble the church; that she can pass her pardon between God and her, without all these formalities, by a secret repentance. 

It is true, beloved, a true repentance is never frustrate: but yet, if thou wilt think thyself a little church, a church to thyself, because thou hast heard it said, that thou art a little world, a world in thyself, that figurative, that metaphorical representation shall not save thee. Though thou beest a world to thyself, yet if thou have no more corn, nor oil, nor milk, than grows in thyself, or flows from thyself, thou wilt starve; though thou be a church in thy fancy, if thou have no more seals of grace, no more absolution of sin, than thou canst give thyself, thou wilt perish.... (Sermon XXXV)

Remarkably contemporary, I think:

It is true, we have not a Demonstration; not such an Evidence as that one and two, are three, to prove these to be Scriptures of God; God hath not proceeded in that manner, to drive our Reason into a pound, and to force it by a peremptory necessitie to accept these for Scriptures, for then, here had been no exercise of our Will, and our assent, if we could not have resisted. (Sermon 36, St. Paul's Christmas-Day)