“I have begun thinking of the cell phone as a contemporary sacrament—an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, which is the grace of communion with those not present in the flesh. Like any other sacrament, this one cuts two ways. Water sustains life, but you can also drown in it. A little wine makes merry, but too much intoxicates.”
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Theologian and ethicist, Gilbert Meilaender, offers an excellent essay on this topic in the February 2009 issue of First Things. Meilaender uses the news of a California company’s announcement about the successful cloning of human embryos to write his daughter inviting her consideration of the significance of such news and the nature of life.
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As a member of a denomination that has placed enormous emphasis on the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s) as a way of reaching out to our brothers and sisters in the “third world,” I have wondered if the economic benefit of past such programs has been adequately understood or researched by our church leaders.
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I make a clear distinction between churches that are evangelical (as all churches should be) and churches defined by the term “evangelicalism.” To be an evangelical congregation is simply to be about the business Jesus called us to: self-awareness that our every reason for being as the church is to embody Christ in our living and to be intentional in sharing the good news with the world.
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I read in two recent news magazines that the Oxford University Press editors of the newly released and updated Oxford Junior Illustrated Dictionary tried hard in this latest edition to reflect Britain’s modern, multi-cultural milieu. Accordingly, new words to the volume include blog, broadband, celebrity, and voicemail. Some evidently antiquated words that did not make the cut this time: empire, monarch, nun, and bishop.
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One of the most important stories on faith in the year 2008 was the release of a massive survey of American religious life completed by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Based on interviews with more than 35,000 adults, the “US Religious Landscape Survey” (http://religions.pewforum.org) confirmed that religious believers in the US sit increasingly loose to doctrine and tradition. Justifiably, the survey received considerable press attention upon its release.
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