The UmBlog

I grew up in the orbits of close family members with narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) and developed abnormal views and expectations about relationships. I knew something was wrong, but could not figure out for decades what that thing was. I've sought counseling to figure out what was wrong with me or with my family members. The ethics of Christ, including his emphasis on forgiveness and forbearance, probably hindered my quest and my counselors input. But as serendipity would have it, while killing time in the local library, the cover story of a recent Psychology Today was about spotting a narcissist . I had explored the topic a bit before this article and had found information on this topic, but I still had not been empowered as a victim of narcissists. Narcissism is everywhere, and all of us have narcissistic tendencies, but I learned that someone who has NPD has no ability to distinguish between their selves and others. To someone with NPD, everyone around them is an exte...

"Our work as leaders in the church is to help catalyze spiritual movement." If you don't share this presupposition about church ministry, you might not benefit from this book . I presume this is the ministry philosophy of the pastors at Willow Creek , who commissioned this sociological study of a thousand (mostly in the United States) churches. The authors categorize church attenders in four buckets: those exploring Christ, those growing in Christ, those close to Christ, and those who are Christ-centered. This is a continuum of maturity or a progression of sanctification. The issues they look at in this most recent book in the Reveal series are about the values of each group, and what churches have found successful in catalyzing people along the continuum, and not letting people stay stuck in one bucket. Can the spiritual be easily reduced to formulas? Of course not, but there are common threads in churches full of people progressing to maturity as seen by their love for...

Whether or not little old me got him blogging on his current series on sacramental marriage, Dr. Tony Jones continues to draw a line that isn't there between legal and sacramental marriage. His latest post, part 4 , he makes an assertion that he won't follow to its end. His assertion is "A church is a semi-private organization, and as such, it has a vested interest in how its members treat one another." The church is also a voluntary association. Thus, if a member wants to mistreat their spouse, and doesn't give a fig what the church thinks of his behavior, there is little the church can do. However, the state can step in if a spouse is abusive and remove the offender from the home and even imprison him. Thankfully, we live in a society where the church and state are separated, which means the church can't go to that level of enforcement. In the same way, if the marriage dissolves, the church is not given authority to set alimony, or child support, or propert...

One defense for the legitimacy of sacramental marriage without a legal marriage certificate is that the civil marriage is a recent invention in humanity's existence. Legality is simple when times are simple, but as a society becomes more complex, new realities arise over time, and more socialist, an entity that redistributes wealth, law must follow to provide enforceable, fair and consistent justice for its citizens. This 2007 NYT opinion piece by Stephanie Coontz sees the same things, but arrives at the opposite conclusion. She opens with this question, WHY do people — gay or straight — need the state’s permission to marry? For most of Western history, they didn’t, because marriage was a private contract between two families. The parents’ agreement to the match, not the approval of church or state, was what confirmed its validity. My thinking is that families could enforce the maintenance of justice in the marriage or divorce. Some societies today still use the dowry system as a...

Addendum May 2013: Dr. Jones announces his attention to civilly marriage . Back on January 4, 2010 Tony Jones PhD, recent author of The Church is Flat and resident theologian of Solomon's Porch --an ecclesiastical community in Minneapolis--posted a call for clergy to get out of the Legal marriage business . He thought it incongruous for the church to act as agents for the state. He writes, And most problematic, from my perspective, is that the clergyperson, with the stroke of a pen, makes legal a contract that s/he has no ability or potential to end. And, having gone through a divorce, I can tell you that extricating oneself from the legal contract that is marriage in our society is no mean feat. And the clergyman who married us was, understandably, not around to help unravel what he had helped establish. It kind of sounds legit. His further intention was to lower the barrier for gays to marry; somehow. I'm not sure how. I have gay friends in Connecticut who were sacra...

I don't know if this genre of books exists, but I would call fathermothergod by Lucia Greenhouse a spiritual horror story. I confess to enjoying Stephen King for a while and his horror fiction, but his writing had nowhere near the effect Greenhouse's memoir did on me. The night I finished the book, the last half of it in one night, past my bedtime, I ended up having a nightmare being trapped in Christian Science . Her father became a church practitioner, someone who prayed for and encouraged sick members, trying to help them get rid of their perception of illness, which founder Mary Baker Eddy denied was reality. To her, only the spiritual is real, and the physical is illusion. He tells her, “Lucia, dear, you know we don’t discuss symptoms in Christian Science. It doesn’t support the healing process.” So when the practioner's daughter wants to get eyeglasses, he felt threatened. I remember my Eyeglasses Rebellion and, more recently, the acrimony I created by announci...

I'm spilling much digital ink on my facebook wall in discussion with a fellow believer in Jesus and lover of the Haitians, whom I met on my trip to Haiti after the big quake. Sometimes he sends Image via Wikipedia me articles from sources such as World Net Daily . I can't link to it. It seems to do more harm than good. I will only post my thoughts and not those of my brother in the Lord. Again, one side of a conversation, in which you'll have to imagine a more erudite partner than myself. Here is where my political philosophy starts. Romans 13:1 Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. Paul doesn't discriminate according to which authority is legitimate or not, many of the Ceasars got to power by killing the previous one. If one should happen to believe President Obama is an enemy, Jesus has a plan for that as well, "But I say unto you, Love yo...