Your Guide to Weekend Reading – July 1

Many of you have been gone for a good portion of the week at your various assemblies/synods/councils/conventions, etc. You’ve elected new leaders, voted on important measures, reengaged with old friends, and yet the blogging world kept spinning. I want to get back in the habit of providing links and materials for you to catch up on during the weekend. Not all bloggers take the weekend off, but a fair number do since traffic tends to be lighter. Here’s your guide for the weekend:

From My Blog

Apprenticeship and Discipleship – Some ruminating on what it means to follow Jesus through the lens of traditional apprenticeships.

Liturgical Muggles and Losing the Sacramental Imagination – A post both in honor of the 20th Anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and an examination of “dull and unimaginative people” in liturgy.

In Defense of “We Just” Prayers…Partially – I am so tired of hearing complaints about people who say “we just” in their prayers and believe it says more about the complainer than the prayer.

From Other Bloggers

At the Table – by Peter Leithart (First Things). “You want to see the renovation of the world? Look for a group of Christians sharing bread and wine, and you’ll see the beginning of humanity’s return to Eden’s tree of life. This is what makes weekly communion so momentous. Where Christians gather to eat and drink, salvation has come to town.”

Pool Party; Father, Son, and Holy Spirt – by Emily Hylden (personal blog). “God as three and one makes us admit that God is beyond our reckoning. We can’t control this God, we can’t completely map out this God. We drown if we insist on trying to figure it out, we can get waterlogged, bogged down, we can miss the point if we insist on engaging God only with our minds, only in the reason of our beings, trying to protect ourselves with our mighty intellects, rather than using all these pieces that God has put in us as ways to relate to him.”

Riding Shotgun: On Being the Clergy-Adjacent – by Carrie Willard (Mockingbird). “rom the passenger seat, I’m a part of that community. I get to see the faces on parents’ faces when their babies are baptized. I get to see the relief on worried faces when I hear my husband preach about God’s unending and nonsensical grace, which transcends time and space and even Creeds. I can never hear about that grace too much, and I’m grateful for the message and for the messengers.”

I Don’t Want a Celebration of Life, I Want a Burial Service – by Greg Goebel (Anglican Pastor). “So if you find it in your hearts to celebrate my life, thank you. I know I won’t deserve it, but I do appreciate the thought. But please do it over a bottle of beer (or diet Coke) in the fellowship hall after the burial, not in place of it.”

Editorial Musings: Sacramental Formation in a Secular Age – by Jessica Keating (Notre Dame Church Life). “In the absence of initiation into the mystery of Christ expressed in its biblical and liturgical keys we find ourselves adrift in a sea of the fragmented facts, emotions, and morals. The human desire to love, our desire for meaning is such that if our imaginations are denied the food of essential realities, if we are denied the key by which to read the Bible and live the Liturgy, we will love lesser things and we will construct meaning from the scraps and fragments that fall from the table of narrative reduction. Our imaginations are so perilously undernourished that we will eat stones if we cannot find bread.”

I should mention that the inclusion of a link/post here does not mean I agree with it fully (or at all). This is meant to generate thoughtful reflection and conversation.