Respectable Christians is not content with faith in the Risen Christ, not content with the grace and love of Christ: he wants the comfort and justification of being on the side of power and convention.
Tag: Thomas Merton
It does not take courage to be authentically yourself; it takes humility.
I am thankful for the presence of Christ, who is all and in all.
Now I sometimes say that I’m religiously bisexual because when I found Buddhist meditation, I felt more Christian than ever.
In our investment in Mass Society, liberal-democratic societies have skilled us at politicizing the nonpolitical.
A person who thinks of herself secretly as a completely autonomous self, with unlimited possibilities (for this concept is what society teaches), finds herself in an impossible situation.
We are now living in the necessary push back and what we need most is grace. Grace is not manufactured or created by us. It is a new person, a new idea, a new consensus - which feels like it falls from heaven.
It is characteristic of pseudo-Christianity that, while claiming to be justified by God, by faith, or by the works of faith and love, it merely operates as a machine for excusing sin instead of confessing and pardoning it. In other words, the pseudo-Church has become a tool for producing a feeling that one is right and everyone else is wrong - a claim with which we are all-too-familiar in the debased culture of ultimate individual autonomy.
To be saved by grace sounds simple enough, grammatically at least. We are born into sin, and redeemed by a sacrificial love which we do not deserve. Baptized at 11, I seemed to have passed the test. Sunday school stuff, really. Let’s go to the all you can eat buffet together, laugh a little, and … Continue reading The Ways of Grace
Raymond Klassen - Ideals and Identities 