Recently, Candyce Leonard brought to my attention a passage from John Cheever’s novel, Falconer, in which the narrator says of Farragut, the main character: “Food was a recently revealed truth in his life. He had reasoned that the Holy Eucharist…
Let the tares alone
Are we courageous enough to stand on conscience, while taking seriously those whose consciences may not now, or ever, be compatible with our own? In 1644, Roger Williams, in London to secure a charter for the new colony of Rhode…
Them and us?
By Bill Leonard Sometimes I think I’d love a good mystical vision, when God told me exactly what is right and wrong; how to believe and behave. Surely then I could sort out all the theological and ethical dilemmas of…
Among the not-yet-housed
By Bill Leonard Each January for several years, I’ve joined a group of theology students for a Wednesday visit to the Haywood Street Congregation in Asheville, N.C. I can’t help but write about it, since the experience is always “transforming,”…
Contending with texts
By Bill Leonard In a 2006 New Yorker story on writer Gertrude Stein, Janet Malcom wrote: “The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties. Almost everything we know we know incompletely at best. And almost nothing we are…
Reckless rhetoric
By Bill Leonard In a diatribe entitled, The Jews and their Lies (1543), Protestant Reformer Martin Luther offered German Christians his shocking recommendations for dealing with what he called that “miserable and accursed people.” The list was long and violent,…
Apologies
By Bill Leonard In an essay posted on Christianhistory.net on July 1, 2007, Scott Manetsch writes: “Before dawn on the morning of August 24, 1572, church bells tolled in the Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois quarter of Paris. Just moments earlier, soldiers under…
Gold, frankincense and espresso
By Bill Leonard When the church’s Christmas witness wanes, let’s blame Starbucks. When our Advent hope falters, let’s fault the “war on Christmas.” When the “Gospel of Wealth” (Andrew Carnegie, 1889) fails to undergird our Bethlehem-borne faith, let’s whine about…
Gawking is not seeing
By Bill Leonard In scene one of Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo, a boy named Andrea enters the scientist’s room carrying “a big astronomical model” showing earth at the center of the galaxy, an idea attributed to the ancient philosopher Ptolemy….