Month: August 2024

Oily politicians are always harping on about “kitchen table” issues and the alleged conversations that take place around them, mostly as a sop to those they have little to do with and even less knowledge of, but whose vote they covet.

Then again, I have my own kitchen table story to tell. And it has the added advantage of actually being real. It happened years ago while having lunch in the kitchen of a college friend’s parents in suburban Chicago.

As it was, his parents were dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalists who insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible. The problem, at the time, was that I was a student at Yale Divinity School, a known liberal bastion. I might as well have had the mark of the beast imprinted on my forehead.

Continue reading “Confessions of a Recovering Apostate”

I think it was C.S. Lewis who tells of the time he was approached by a woman complaining about a church member who, in her mind, was unpleasant, uncouth, and just plain disagreeable.

Lewis’ shrewd response nails it. “Yes,” he advised, “but you should have seen him before he became a Christian.”

In my last post, https://climbingthewalls.org/sermon-christianity-a-well-known-stranger/, I pointed out that sin, contrary to common thought, actually means “the state of being separated from God,” sin being a relational term.

I also pointed out that the mythological story of the Garden of Eden and the Fall in the first three chapters of Genesis marks the symbolic movement from a once perfect relationship with our Creator to the alienated one we now experience here East of Eden.

But does this fall from grace constitute the final word? Are we destined, in other words, to live in a desacralized world devoid of hope or promise?

Continue reading “Then What?”