It's interesting that I could catalogue each of my failures.  I'm keenly aware of the times I've comprimised, forgotten, or otherwise done something that would have warranted a pater noster or rosary in years gone by.  Does Lent have this effect on anyone else?  I'm interested to know how people deal with Lent.  Is it a 'Challenge' something akin to a diet or contest where we pit ourselves up against a standard or ideal we set for ourselves and then feel discouraged when we fail to meet that standard?

The association between religious communities and food has been noticed widely.  The Christian church almost has more in common across it's denominations with regards to culinary traditions than theology.  We believe vastly disparate things and yet there is not a congregation you can find without some tradition of pot-luck, post-worship meal, or monthly fellowship get together.  I find it intensely interesting when rituals unite us where ideas cannot.  Perhaps inter-necine arguments should be held around circular tables with bread and a warm hearty meal...

While travelling, my ability to fast as strictly from Bovine and Porcine fat has been limited.  No-fat cheese and yogurt hasn't always been available, and my control over the ingredients that go into dishes, sauces, and drinks hasn't been as good as it would be in my own kitchen.  At first this caused me pain as my lent is flawed.  I felt poigniantly my failure to acheive the standard that I set for myself.  However, this 'benchmarking' had its own failures.  The need to reach perfection, to be thoroughly discipined and succeed are all forms of contro

Four days into Lent and the exercise is raising more questions than it's answering.  My inability to perform a 'perfect' lent leaves me with a sinking feeling of failure and comprimise and yet each of these choices was made for good reason.  Perhaps the oddest insight is that my Protestant upbringing, which makes so much of God's forgiveness, has left me with a persistent feeling of guilt.  The choices that I made, to have 2% milk in my coffee instead of cream (although a perfect lent would have refrained from even that amount of dairy fat), my slip up on Ash Wednesday w

18 hours into Lent and I'm wondering what it means to 'slip up'.  My intention is that abstinence from beef and pork fats will extend to dairy products that contain milk fat, and things cooked in pork fat or beef tallow.  As a Catholic this wouldn't be a problem because I could just seek an 'indulgence' and thus make up for any errors through good works.  The current protestant understanding of Lent doesn't seem to have any such 'forgiveness' built in to it.  So one either has to just live with the guilt of having failed, or has to learn to forgi

 I've been told that there is no such thing as Cultural Christianity.  That it's so closely intertwined with 'Western' culture that one cannot be a cultural Christian the way that one can be a cultural jew or muslim without strictly holding to the teachings.  If this proves to be the case then there is very little in my heritage that I can cling to and would have to leave my entire Christian upbringing behind simply because I'm walking away from most of the doctrines of Christian Orthodoxy.

 Jesuology,  Jesuolatry,  Christology, Christianity and Christianisms.  It's odd that I find kinship with a such a conservative theologian as Hodge when he warns against "bibliolatry" while at the same time having sympathies for the most liberal of Christians: Shleiermacher and Spong.   

Two points have driven my recent thinking (which is, in fact, quite recent as I've avoided theologising for about a year): 

1) We cannot continue to confuse our descriptions of divine work with the divine itself (that would be idolatry) and

 I gave it another shot.  But once again, Christianity is hollow and dead for me.  The only honest people that I've found (the ones that accept history and scholarship for what it is and stop trying to perpetuate a fairy tale that only spreads hurt) in the Church still can't answer for it.  Once we strip away the Myth of the risen Lord, the Exclusionist and supercessionist theologies of Salvation, and every one of the miracle stories we have nothing.

 I wonder if that word will bother anyone.  I hope so.  I hope that it bothers people the way that X-mas does.  Interestingly, the x doesn't stand for just anything the way that it does in Math.  I was taught that it comes from Xristos and is the first letter of Jesus last name (as we've come to pretend) which might as well be an X because we don't actually know which first century Yeshua we're talking about (it's not an uncommon name).  However, it may be more enlightening to use it the way we do in Math.

 Hey, does anyone out there know if it's true that you can get a one-day permission to marry someone if you fill out the proper forms?  I'm not even remotely ordained (yet) but I have a friend who wants me to marry them next summer here in BC.  Is that even possible?