Posts from March 2019

Posts from March 2019

Pride

The early Church father Augustine, who was the bishop of Hippo in Africa and one of the most important theologians of that early period, considered the sin of pride to be the fundamental sin, the root from which all other sins proceeded.  He pointed to the sin of pride that motivated Satan to seek to desire God’s place, as well as the sin of pride that consumed Adam…

The End of the World As We Know It

A favorite children’s story is “Chicken Little,” which is about a naïve fowl who has the proclivity to believe the end of the world has begun as the result of some rather mundane event (in many tellings of this fable, an acorn falling out of a tree and hitting her on the head).  Chicken Little begins to run to all her friends in order to warn them – quite hysterically –…

The Beauty of Diversity

Where I grew up (the northeast Georgia mountains), there was not very much diversity, however you would like to define it.  The county was pretty close to 100% Caucasian, and at the time, there were not all that many residents who could not trace their roots back to some of the earliest settlers of the area.  This lack of diversity, sadly, often led to ideas and…

The UMC and the Moral Revolution

Ever since the United Methodist Church (UMC) was formed in 1968 by the merger of the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church, the question of how the denomination should view homosexuality has been a recurring issue at each of their quadrennial General Conferences.  This conflict existed despite the fact that The Book of Discipline, the…