Christianity... is COOL!

I love this photo, though I don't think I look very good in it. I'm kind of red faced, and I think I look really young. I have longer hair and a bit of a sort of a beard at the moment.

The photo was taken at Come to the Feast 2004, in Tampa. Florida. It was an ecumencial NCCUSA young adult ministry conference. I was helping to clear up at the end of the conference and so I picked up this cross that was being returned to a local church. One of the conference organisers, who was an Episcopal priest, said, 'I gotta get a picture of this - a Unitarian carrying a cross.' and so he took this. It was like a year later when I was browsing a website about the conference that I found this picture posted online and downloaded it for myself. It makes me smile.

By the way, I stuck a knife in that thumb once and nearly lost it, so I'm lucky to be able to do that.

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Radical?

When I started this blog nearly 4 years and nearly 300 posts ago one of the labels I used for it/me was "radical." Perhaps I used it a little unreflectively. Recently I've been pondering what radical means. A couple of things have made me think of this. Firstly this blog series from my friend Jeremy, which explores a distinction between "radical progressives" and "rational progressives." There is also this definition of radical, liberal and conservative from Terry Eagleton quoted at Young Anabaptist Radicals : “Radicals are those who believe that things are extremely bad with us, but they could feasibly be much improved. Conservatives believe that things are pretty bad, but that’s just the way the human animal is. And liberals believe that there’s a little bit of good and bad in all of us.” What interests me is finding a way to express the tension I feel sometimes between myself and the wider Unitarian movement. One way to express this is to say I tend

What does it mean to be non-creedal?

Steve Caldwell says "The problem here isn't humanism vs. theism for theist Unitarian Universalists -- it's the non-creedal nature of Unitarian Universalism" This is a good point. We need to think much more deeply about what it means to be a non-creedal religion. The first thing I want to say is that there is more than one possible understanding of non-creedalism. The Disciples of Christ are a non-creedal church, they say here : " Freedom of belief. Disciples are called together around one essential of faith: belief in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Persons are free to follow their consciences guided by the Bible, the Holy Spirit study and prayer, and are expected to extend that freedom to others." Quakers are also non-creedal and say here : Quakers have no set creed or dogma - that means we do not have any declared statements which you have to believe to be a Quaker. There are, however, some commonly held views which unite us. One accepted view is that th

What is Radical Christianity?

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