Two bloggers meet for lunch

Hafidha and I had lunch while I was in Portland. It's been three years since we last met, and I think at about the same time three years ago we both started blogging. Thanks for lunch Hafidha and blessings and prayers to you!

By the way, I'm glad I got some sunshine in America, because it was just hailing - in August! Oh dear.

Comments

Anonymous said…

Oh Stephen, it was good to see you in person after all this time. You look GREAT, and thank you so much for the book. I definitely plan to blog about it soon (in the midst of all these other things, I have actually been reading it in snippets - the format is great).

Sorry about your hailstorm, and heaven bless you for only posting the top half of that photograph! LOL.

10:34 pm

Swords into Ploughshares

"They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." Isaiah 2:4 Palestine Action are doing just this: beating swords into ploughshares i.e. putting weapons out of use. In doing so they are fulfilling this biblical mandate. They are expressing God's peace as expressed in the Jewish tradition and the Christian tradition. God desires that our swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, that we should unlearn war. That the government wants to make this action illegal has to be confronted in the strongest terms. To rush to condemn attacks on weapons but not attacks on children is perverse. To call attacks on weapons terrorism but not attacks on children is perverse. When government comes to such an extreme position - legislating that peace is war, that weapons need more protection than children - then they have fundamentally gone wrong. This is the definitio...

Is humanism theologically tolerant?

OK, well this might be controversial, but I feel the need to say it. Is humanist tolerant? Please note I'm not asking about humanism within society. Clearly humanism certainly believes in tolerance within society and I'm forever glad they are often the only people in the media calling for a separation of church and state. No, what I'm talking about is descriptions of Unitarianism like this and adverts like this , discussed at Peacebang here , which say that humanism is one option, Christianity is another, God is one option among many. The trouble is, humanism, by definition is theologically opposed to theism. This is very different from the relationship between Christianity and Buddhism. These two traditions may be vastly different, but Buddhism, by definition , is not opposed to Christianity, and Christianity, by definition , is not opposed to Buddhism. But humanism is consciously defined in opposition to Christianity and theism. So to say that humanism and theism can bot...

The dumbest thing about American Unitarian Univeralism

I'm glad Peacebang started blogging about this cos I was about to, and now it's like I'm joining in with a conversation rather than doing a big rant and having a go at Americans (though that is always fun ;-)). Why the hell do American (or is it just in New England??) UU churches take, like a quarter of the year off? In the summer they close. They CLOSE!! A church, closing. It's so bloody weird and wrong. Where does it come from? Why? Why? Why? Why do people need church less in the summer? Where are people supposed to go? Where is the Divine supposed to go? My church in Boston didn't close exactly, but moved to the smaller upstairs chapel, but the minister still had all that time off. Now I've spent most of my life around teachers and priests, both jobs where people think people don't put many hours in, when in fact they put in loads ('you only work Sunday mornings/9 to 3.25'). Teachers work hard and need their long holidays. Ministers work hard, a...

Reignite

Search This Blog