May 30, 2013

On Earlham's website now is the Baccalaureate Speech given earlier this month by Biology Professor Bob Rosenberg, and it is very much worth reading. Each year at the college, the graduating seniors choose a member of the faculty to deliver the baccalaureate address. (That is, there is no outside speaker parachuted in for the occasion.) These addresses are consistently wonderful, and many of them are…

May 27, 2013

            A high school girl in a band uniform singing the National Anthem, old Corvettes and Thunderbirds, men in uniforms from various services and decades, motorcycles, a bagpipe corps, the wife of the Governor, decorated floats, families along Main Street in lawn chairs, and everywhere flags: these are the makings of a Memorial Day Parade. Here in Maine, Topsham and Brunswick have a big one each year. My son marches as a member of his Cub Scout Pack. This year he…

May 22, 2013

In response to a recent blog post on the seepage of the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy into Quakerism, a Friend asked for examples. Here is one.

In this month’s “Communicator,” the yearly meeting’s newsletter, Indiana Yearly Meeting’s Superintendent, Doug…

May 19, 2013

May 16, 2013

Worth reading this week is a blog post by Rachel Held Evans entitled Is God’s Presence Limited to the Scripture?

The question is on her mind (her answer is no) because of a blog post by Tim Challies, a prominent evangelical, on The Boundaries of Evangelicalism.…

May 13, 2103

For a very long while the Bible was clearly an unfinished work.  I believe it is still. 

The books in the Hebrew Testament were written over several centuries, probably most before 500 BCE. The set of books we have today were in final form by about 100 BCE – that is a few decades before Jesus’s birth. The books in the New Testament were mostly written in…

This is the third in a series of posts about the Bible in which I want to say how and why I find the Bible essential for my spiritual life. (The first is here. The second is here.) I hope these musings may be useful to others.  The reflections in these posts about the Bible draw on material I presented at the…

May 3, 2013

I have been rummaging again in the Friends Journal archive. Access to back issues is a terrific benefit of a subscription. In the June 15, 1968 issue (page 296) I found this gem, “‘Amo’ or ‘Credo’?” by L. Willard Reynolds, then a pastor in Nebraska Yearly Meeting (FUM).  His piece–could have been written today–follows.

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 Robert Frost, in an…