A Two Goal Lead is the Most Dangerous Lead...

The food here is amazing, and wonderful, and spectacular and perfect and yummy. Did I mention the food here is really good?

This is the view from the building most of our meetings take place in. It is quite beautiful here in wine country...

As some of you know, Brian McLaren will be with us in Minnesota for two days in September, the 21st and 22nd, to be exact. In preparation for his visit, and to ensure we get as much contextualized conversation as possible, we are asking Minnesota Episcopalians to blog. The blog is under construction at the moment, but can be found at www.episcopalspirit.com (or www.episcopalspirit.wordpress.com) Rather than ask a specif question, we are asking that you reflect on the following passage from the book of Wisdom (7:22-23) in context with the message of Brian McLaren's new book, "A New Kind of Christianity", which is essentially a series of essays n the ways Christianity as an institutionalized religion is changing. There is in her a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile, clear, unpolluted, distinct, invulnerable, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent, humane, steadfast, sue, free from anxiety, all powerful, overseeing all, and penetra...

God...Miracles. “Fairy tales are more than true,” writes G.K. Chesterton, “not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that they can be beaten.” Now a number of the scriptural commentaries I read this week almost made me think there were dragons in these texts. Scholars were uneasy with these miracles happening in any kind of historical way, and they thought you might be, too. And I understand that concern. I do. They are hard to believe. And we’re supposed to be uneasy, in a way. We don’t live in a miraculous society. We live in a scientific one, a technological community where the events that draw us together are the release of the latest Apple gadget or the finale of a beloved television series. If our lives were fairy tales indeed, our Merlins would be more likely be found in a board room than a woody glen, more likely working in the hospital’s surgery than in the hospital’s chapel. Rational, comprehensible inquiry saturates the very ...