According to recent surveys, Americans increasingly are describing themselves as unaffiliated with any particular religious tradition. More than 16 percent of those questioned in the biggest of these surveys, the 2007 “U.S. Religious Landscape” report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, say they are unaffiliated:
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Spirituality vs. religion
N.B., this post is a kind of “exploratory” post. I’m not yet ready to take a definite position on the question. One of the reasons why many theologians have been attracted to the theory of a “fundamental option” is that it seems in certain respects to correspond better to real-life experience.
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Mortal Sin and Fundamental Option
In the previous post I attempted to describe a man who, as far as morally possible, related to his family in a manner analogous to the manner a Christian relates to God, so that even things that normally are not incompatible with marital love would exclude it. We could also consider a more realistic case, in
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Mortal Sin and Fundamental Option 2
From the De Malo to the Summa Theologiae Aquinas apparently makes a shift in his judgment about drunkenness. While in the De Malo he says that getting drunk is of itself a venial sin, in the Summa Theologiae and in the Commentary on Romans (as well as the Commentary on 1 Corinthians), which are widely
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Aquinas on the Sin of Drunkenness
Though Aquinas clearly affirms that the influence of passions on the will can decrease the degree of voluntariness, and thus the merit or demerit of good actions or sins, when it comes to gravely disordered acts, such as fornication, masturbation, or theft, he still sees the issue as basically black or white: either the act
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Aquinas on Mortal Sins of Passion
In the early Church, the practice of the sacrament of confession was not a very common affair. While there is certainly testimony to the confession of light sins in the sacrament of confession, it was most associated with severe sins that demanded a canonical and public penance.
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St. Augustine, Penance, and the Forgiveness of Sins
When speaking about the influence of passions on the will, Aquinas takes the position that so long as people retain the use of reason and free will, if they are moved by passion to do a gravely disordered act, then they sin mortally. Only if they are so overcome by passion that they no longer
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Aquinas on Mortal Sins and Ignorance
When a person commits a mortal sin out of ignorance, when does he commit he a mortal sin, and in what does it consist? Take the case of a married person believes that contraception is not intrinsically wrong, and consequently judges in a particular case that he or she is obliged to use artificial contraception
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Mortal Sins and Ignorance II – Where and When is the Mortal Sin?
I just finished reading Richard Rohr’s The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See . Rohr’s aim is to help us get beyond dualistic thinking by encouraging us to live “in the naked now, the ‘sacrement of the present moment,’ that will teach us how to actually experience our experiences, whether good, bad, or ungly, and how to let them transform us.” Nonduality is not a principle unique to Christian mystical thought; as Rohr points out in his book, the Hindu, Mahayana Buddhist and Chinese Taoist religions all proceed from a worldview of nonduality. But it takes on a disctinctive form in Christianity.
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What it Means to Follow Jesus
Thielicke, speak to us about Spurgeon . . . For Spurgeon the really determinative foundation of the education of preachers was naturally this work on the spiritual man. The education of preachers must not be directly pragmatic; it must not be immediately directed to preaching as its goal. Otherwise the process of education becomes an act of mere training, the teaching of technical skills. The preacher must read the Bible without asking in the back of his mind how he can capitalize homiletically upon the text he studies. He must first read it as nourishment for his own soul
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Borrowed Light