christianity

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The other week was Pentecost: the day that Christians remember as the start of the church as Christ’s kingdom of emissaries in this temporal realm and age. It is the Sunday that many churches take to honor the coming of the Holy Spirit onto the followers of Jesus, as recorded in Acts, chapter 2.

I spent this year’s Pentecost visiting with a friend, at a United Methodist congregation. It was also the final Sunday that the minister of this particular assembly would have with the people that he had served for many years. Per a tradition that hearkens back to the days of the circuit riders, United Methodist ministers will be at one church for a few years before being assigned to another, at which time the congregation will receive a new minister who will serve them until the next time that the conference gets to the task of re-assignment....

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…and I can’t wait to finally load up on plasmids!

Huh? What’s that?! You mean… it’s not THAT Rapture, but instead the other kind?!?!?

humph…

Dear Mr. Harold Camping: “Would you kindly…” stop with this nonsense? We are told in the Bible that no one but the Father in Heaven knows when the end of days will come. This shouldn’t be anything we’re meant to be concerned with anyway. In his epistles to the Thessalonians, the apostle Paul taught that we are to occupy with the business of living for Christ, and not be swept up in this sort of fear-mongering.

Yes, I look forward also to the return of our Lord and Savior. And I do believe that He is coming again. How? Because I believe that He came the first time. The path that I took to my faith in Christ, it’s not one I ...

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This is an Orthodox chapel near the city of Chiatura in the former Soviet state of Georgia…

Oh yes, you can go in… but first you have the climb a rickety, rusty metal ladder up a 130-feet tall column of rock. The building atop the column was constructed sometime between the sixth and eighth centuries and is thought to have at first been a pagan temple (the rock being ummmm… symbolic of “fertility”, parse that as you will).

The Orthodox churches credit their founding to the apostle Andrew, who journeyed to the region following the ascension of Christ. With the conversion of the pagans, the temple became a Christian chapel. Today it is being restored and is even the home of an Orthodox priest.

My brain feels staggered just looking at the photo of this thing. Just… wow.

Click here to learn more about the chapel at Chiatura, ...

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READER ADVISORY: This, the fifth installment of an ongoing series exploring what I have experienced and learned from living with bipolar disorder, contains an account of an extremely graphic nature. My writing about it here marks the first time that I have revealed in public an incident, the nature of which I pray would never happen to anyone. This advisory is not to “warn away” anyone from reading it at all. In fact, it is my desire that you would read it. I only ask for two things: that you, Dear Reader, will bear in mind that I am writing about this for the first time because it marks a very terrible period in my life that, I must give credit to God for bringing me through. And that the account itself is not the reason at all for this chapter of Being Bipolar. The real heartmeat of this installment
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As if the Being Bipolar series wasn’t enough: I’m about to put even more on this blog on a regular basis!

(Maybe it has something to do with the recent redesign of this place, that it’s just demanding lots of new content…? 🙂

The first is something that I’ve had in mind since Christmas, and is coming out of some necessity but also I think it’ll be a lot of fun: Movies I’ve Never Seen! It’s like this: my DVR is fast filling up with stuff that I’ve recorded from TCM and some other channels. And I haven’t seen them yet. Like, not ever. Even though most of these are movies that I’ve heard of all my life! Well, I’m going to begin watching them, and posting reviews of them here. Expect that to start up sometime this week.

And then, there is something that… is going to be ...

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In the wake of last week’s tragic incident in Tuscon there have been reams of pages written about human nature, with one spin or another on the subject.

I haven’t read anything that is as poignant and beautiful as what Monsignor Charles Pope – pastor of Holy Comforter-St. Cyprian – has composed on his blog hosted by the Archdiocese of Washington.

Here’s an excerpt “Life is Worth Living: On the Strength and Resilience of the Human Person”…

One of the rights our modern age demands is the right to declare that certain lives are not worth living. In utero testing sometimes reveals the possibility or even the certainty of birth defects. Abortion is often recommended to mothers who carry “defective” children and sometimes that recommendation becomes pressure. It is said that almost 90% of families who receive a poor pre-natal diagnosis choose to abort.

And yet there are so

...
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