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No Japan Travelogue yet. I’ll be working on that this week for both you all and for Theopolis and have it out early next week.
Today I just want to share a scene from my fiction reading (which has been sparse as of late). As I tell each fellows cohort at Theopolis: be careful of becoming the kind of person who only reads non-fiction theology, or you risk becoming the kind of person who only reads non-fiction theology...
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This week Landon and I will be travelling to Japan on the first formal international missions trip of All Saints Honolulu with the main goal of establishing long-term missional relationships there.
What follows is a loose itinerary of our trip —at least, what our itinerary looks like right now. As you think of us in the days ahead, and as you pray for us, this itinerary can help give you and idea of where we are at as you pray…
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…The first two days of the sickness were particularly terrible. Unceasing high-grade fever and a dizzying migraine perpetual, were attended by the whole panoply of aches, muscle cramps, chills, and frequent trips to the lavatory —a veritable Jabberwocky of bodily discomfort.
During those two days I listened to Max McClean read through the books of Leviticus and Numbers as I drifted between various degrees of awareness. And I must say it was an absolute treasure…
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“Fat Tuesday” and “Shrove Tuesday.” Are these two concepts opposites?
It may be easy to equate the whole tradition of “Fat Tuesday” with all the excesses of Mardi Gras: too much greasy food, too much inspirited beverage, too much skin, etc. And it may be easy to think, as the righteous Anglicans we are, of “Shrove Tuesday” as it’s redeemed antithesis: prayers, sobriety, the long deep breath as we plunge into the austerities of Lent.
I contend, however, this is not so… or, at least, if it is so, that it ought not to be…
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On Candlemas Simeon holds the infant Christ in his arms and, by the power of the Spirit, sees that God has been faithful to the promise given to him —that he would not die before he saw the Lord’s Christ (cf. Luke 2:22-40).
Having seen the Child, Simeon declares those famous lines “Master, now you can let your bondservant depart in peace according to your word, for my eyes have seen your Salvation….” you know the rest.
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Early into his recent book Rumors (Polity, 2025), Mladen Dolar makes a fairly big mistake which sets the whole project (an exciting proposal —to explore the concept of ‘rumor’ philosophically) on a rather shaky footing. Here’s what he says: …
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Is an annual parish meeting “spiritual?”
Short answer:
Yes.
Long answer:
It is easy to think of life as an artificial partition between the things that are ‘material’ and the things that are ‘spiritual’…
T…he problem is that confidence, precisely because of what it is, “can never be instantaneous” (p.76). “It must be built, earned, over time” (ibid). Confidence, as the capacity to endure and withstand, only exists over the course of time. “It has a tempo.”
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“Fear not, for behold I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be for all the people” (Lk. 2:10)
A key feature of the duties of angels in the Gospels is to tell God’s people to not be afraid. The angel says it to Zachariah (Lk. 1:13), to Mary (Lk. 2:30), to Joseph (Matt. 1:20), to the Shepherds (as above, Lk. 2:10), and to the women at the tomb on Easter (Matt. 28:5).
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Every Advent witnesses the gruesome reanimation of the voice that whispers “you know, Christmas is just a pagan holiday…” with that sort of conversational ellipsis that does not so much invite further reflection but halts and forecloses it. The claims are several and equally spurious: Jesus wasn’t born on the 25th, it’s really just an ancient [INSERT CIVILIZATION] practice, it’s just the winter solstice of the northern hemisphere, it’s gone too commercial, it’s become an idol in its own right, Christianity is not about the manger it’s about the Cross, etc.
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