My Philosophy on Sundry Things

The One Thing I Know
"The one thing I know is that God is good.
That his heart bleeds every time a human’s heart does.
Our pain is his pain, all of it, all of it.
And that he is gentle, and steadfast, and will not waste one drop of our suffering."

Truth. Worded by Chubbic
 
My Faith
I'm a weird Charismatic-Catholic-Reformed hybrid whose theology is a mishmash of the aforementioned mix. It's not that I don't know what I believe, because I definitely do. It's that what I believe it falls somewhere between many different denominational lines.

I'm a Christian. I believe in the Bible and the Apostles Creed.

God has come to me in the Sacraments. I take 'This is My body' at face value. And I do think that on some level, the Saints are watching us (Hebrews 11:31-12:2) and praying for us, not because God cares more about them than us, but because, they are our family. And it's what families do. Sometimes listening to tradition is really a reality check, recognizing that your interpretation of a passage of Scripture may be less clear than someone else's (even if that someone else happened to live 1000 yrs ago or is the Pope).
But I also think its very important that we try to understand/derive things by hashing them out the Scriptures. It's our duty to wrestle out Theology from the Bible with our fallible brains and the help of the Holy Spirit. Even if we end up in strange places, crying over double predestination. There's a place for the diagrams and headaches and arguments. There's also a place to step back, and accept a mystery. But we have to do both.
And I believe that there is indeed a spiritual battle raging around us, for our souls. And that we must put on the armour of God and fight, recognizing that we do not war against flesh and blood. We have to 'let the Holy Spirit steer our ship' and fight our battles through us.

God the Father did after all, give us the Word, and reached out to us through the Word made flesh. And His Holy Spirit.


Politically. 
I think one of the worst things is to not recognize the worst things, going on in your time. Because, by virtue of it being everywhere, you are inured to it. Like the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, like Slavery in the (Christian) American South. Like infanticide in most of the pre-Christian cultures of the earth. And we say, "If I had been in the South when preachers defended slavery.....If I had been in Germany when Hitler was running for office....If I had been a Roman woman ordered to expose her infant...."

But it's hardest to see one's own culture's blindspot. The particular segment of people that your culture has decided to dehumanize, (Jews, Africans, newborns...)

This is ours.


And we can't just say its the way the world works. Anymore then the Southern Christians could say that slavery was just the way the world was. Or the Germans say that Jews just were going to be gassed and that's that, and it's better ignore this, so we can focus on bigger issues, like economic justice and making sure there's a chicken in every pot. (Not that we shouldn't care about poverty, education gaps, etc. But we need to get our priorities straight)

On Grace, Wrath, Atonement--Why Jesus came to die
My blog post here...

On Modesty
My blog post here...
  

On Marriage
My blog posts here, here, here

Parenting,
Best bit of toddler parenting advice I ever received. It changed my life. (From Kendra Tierney's blog)
ALWAYS MEAN WHAT YOU SAY.

Babies and Birthcontrol/NFP
About wanting babies and family planning and knowing the future, Jennifer Fulwiler sums up my thoughts on the subject better than I ever could. My answer to "Do you want more children?"    (on risks and all that Never Say Never)

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