"I felt like hurting someone before, now I feel like hugging people". Only weeks after professing his belief in Jesus Christ, former
Korn guitarist
Brian “Head” Welch was
baptized in the Jordan River last Saturday. With “Jesus” tattooed across his knuckles and “
Matthew 11:28” along his neck, Welch received
full immersion in the historic river, along with 20 other white-robed Christians from a Bakersfield, CA church. Welch said the ritual baptism, “washed away his anger.” "My songs are God saying things to me, him talking to people. He's going to use me to heal people and people are going to be drawn to it, just watch, they will be.” For the
latest information (and a
free mp3) go to Welch's personal website, http://www.
headtochrist.com/
posted by matteo
on Mar 10, 2005 -
148 comments
Born-again liberal Christians. Do you think that mainline denominations are hemorraging members? Wrong. Fundamentalist Christianity is the way of the future and all US Evangelicals worship the same political party?
Not so fast, buddy.
Many scholars and
theologians think that it's time for liberals to take Christianity back.
Oregon State's
Marcus J Borg, for example, argues that Christianity "still makes sense and is the most viable religious option for millions". He contends the earlier paradigm,
based upon a punitive God, simply doesn't work anymore for too many people.
It is an argument for an alternative to the literalist and
exclusivist tradition that has dominated Western Christianity in the modern era. According to Borg, "So different are these two views of Christianity that
they almost produce two different religions, both using the same Bible and language. A time of two paradigms is virtually
a tale of two Christianities."
There is, for example, an alternative view to the Resurrection Narrative
not as report of an actual, physical event but as means for Jesus' early followers
to express the miracle of his continuing spiritual presence among them,
after his execution. It is in short an 'emerging paradigm which has been developing for over a hundred years and has recently become a major grass-roots movement within mainline denominations'.
Just
don't be afraid to
ask questions. Not even about the
dogs beneath the Cross. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Nov 19, 2004 -
100 comments
"Jesus?" he murmured, "Jesus -- of Nazareth?..." Pontius Pilate,
prefect of
Judea, is
the only historical figure named in the
Nicene Creed -- Coptic
saint or
eternally damned, his role in the
greatest story ever told has been debated by many of history's greatest minds:
St Augustine,
Dante Alighieri,
Tintoretto,
John Ruskin,
Mikhail Bulgakov,
Monty Python. Unfortunately,
there is very little historical evidence about him. His role in the
death of a
certain charismatic
Galilean healer and
apocalyptic preacher
is still being debated today by
theologians and historians
alike. He is also, of course, the main character of
The Procurator of
Judea, the classic short story (complete text in main link) by
Anatole France. (France's magnificent story has lately been tragically neglected by publishers, even if the author was one of his era's most acclaimed writers in the world -- he won the Nobel Prize in 1921 over Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Proust, and when he died in 1924,
hundreds of thousands of people followed his funeral procession through Paris). These last 2,000 years of fascination with
Pilatus can be explained, some argue...
(more inside, for those unwilling to wash their hands of this post)
posted by matteo
on Jun 24, 2004 -
37 comments
