Many who live in Taber describe the Mennonites as rude and destructive. Local business and restaurant owners, who wished to remain anonymous, said they have to kick out groups of Mennonite kids on a regular basis for fighting, shouting and throwing things at other customers. “Nobody will even say the word. I couldn’t tell you how many police, politicians and public leaders I’ve seen do a little knowing smile and wink when it comes to issues of young Mennonites racing their trucks around town . . . drinking and driving, littering and harassing local residents,” wrote reporter J.W. Schnarr in his March 11 column about the bylaw in the Taber Times.
Richard Rhor: Jesus came not to change God’s Mind about Humanity
The best way I can summarize how Scotus tried to change the old notion of retributive justice is this: Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God. God in Jesus moved people beyond the counting, weighing, and punishing model, that the ego prefers, to the utterly new world that Jesus offered, where God’s abundance has made any economy of merit, sacrifice, reparation, or atonement both unhelpful and unnecessary. Jesus undid “once and for all” (Hebrews 7:27; 9:12; 10:10) all notions of human and animal sacrifice and replaced them with his new economy of grace, which is the very heart of the gospel revolution.
.. We all need to know that God does not love us because we are good; God loves us because God is good. Nothing humans can do will ever decrease or increase God’s eternal eagerness to love.
Hildegard of Bingen
(11 min) She doesn’t quote. She doesn’t write in the scholastic style, but in the Benedictine format.
(24 min) It’s not a narrative. It doesn’t have chapter divisions.
The Purity Culture of Progressives
And this “will to purity” doesn’t just manifest in protecting sacred beliefs, it manifests inbehavior as well. Both evangelical and progressive Christians doggedly pursue a vision ofmoral purity.
For evangelical Christians moral purity will fixate on hedonism (e.g., sex, drug use).
For progressive Christians moral purity will fixate on complicity in injustice. To be increasingly “pure” in progressive Christian circles is to become less and less complicit in injustice. Thus there is an impulse toward a more and more radical lifestyle where, eventually, you find yourself feeling that “everything is problematic.” You can’t do anything without contaminating yourself.
.. “A pharisee is hard on others and easy on himself, but a spiritual man is easy on others and hard on himself.”