bonar crump

bonar crump
husband - father - reader - runner - picker - grinner - lover - sinner

Sunday, February 27, 2011

John Dominic Crossan's 'blasphemous' portrait of Jesus

By John Blake, CNN
"One of his first fan letters came from someone who declared:

"If Hell were not already created, it should be invented just for you."

Other critics have called him "demonic," "blasphemous" and a "schmuck."

When John Dominic Crossan was a teenager in Ireland, he dreamed of becoming a missionary priest. But the message he's spreading about Jesus today isn't the kind that would endear him to many church leaders.

Crossan says Jesus was an exploited "peasant with an attitude" who didn't perform many miracles, physically rise from the dead or die as punishment for humanity's sins.

Jesus was extraordinary because of how he lived, not died, says Crossan, one of the world's top scholars on the "historical Jesus," a field in which academics use historical evidence to reconstruct Jesus in his first-century setting."

Faith In A Greater Reality - Hope That You Will Survive

THOUGHTS ON FAITH AND HOPE
by Martha Woodroof

"Now, I don’t mean to imply that Thomas Merton offers this story as anything other than a casual, back-ward glance. Yet while reading it, I had what I think of one of those light bulb moments of faith, a jump in awareness of what it means to me (or you or anyone) to live in partnership with God. Reading this slight anecdote from a monk’s childhood, it came to me that one of major gifts of faith is the persistent presence of hope in one’s head and heart. And by hope, I mean a kind of blessed, essential calmness—a deep certainty that what’s truly indispensable to one’s sense of well-being is fundamentally unaffected by what happens; that it has to do, instead, with rooting one’s life in a partnership with God. And so, it came to me while reading that paragraph written by Thomas Merton, that I was now a truly hopeful person, because I feel certain that no matter what happens to me, I—as a person of faith—will go on feeling comfortable with who I am in the world as it is. "

Study: Top 5 religion stories of 2010

By Dan Gilgoff, CNN Belief Blog Co-Editor

"Four of the top five religion stories of 2010 - the ones that got the most ink - involved Islam, according to a major study out Thursday about faith coverage in the news.

Another headline from the study, conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life: For the first time since 2007, neither the Roman Catholic Church nor religion’s role in U.S. politics were the No. 1 topic of faith coverage among major news media.

Here are the top 5 religion stories from 2010, according to the study, which examined more than 50,000 stories from newspapers, news websites, newscasts on network and cable TV and radio programming.

1. Controversy over a proposed Islamic center near New York's ground zero (23% of coverage)
2. The abuse scandal within the Roman Catholic Church. (19% of coverage)
3. The Rev. Terry Jones' threatened Koran burning in Florida (15% of coverage)
4. Religion in the Obama administration (6% of coverage)
5. Commemorations of the September 11, 2001 attacks (5% of coverage)

What do you think? Are there any religion stories that deserved more attention in 2010 than these five?"