Even the greatest love, in fact, when it is not continuously fed, fades and goes out. Not without reason the Apostle Paul warns: “Take heed to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the Church of God which he obtained with the blood of his own Son”(Acts 20:28).

The lack of vigilance—we know—makes the pastor lukewarm; he becomes distracted, forgetful and even impatient; it seduces him with the prospect of a career, the lure of money, and the compromises with the spirit of the world; it makes him lazy, turning him into a functionary, a cleric worried more about himself, about organisations and structures, than about the true good of the People of God. He runs the risk, then, like the Apostle Peter, of denying the Lord, even if he is present to us and speaks in His name; the holiness of the hierarchy of Mother Church is obscured, making it less fertile.

Who are we, Brothers, before God? What are our challenges? We all have so many, each one of us knows his own. What is God saying to us through them? What are we relying on to overcome them?

He continued with a word of encouragement:

As it was for Peter, the insistent and heartfelt question of Jesus can leave us saddened and may leave us more aware of the weakness of our freedom, beset as it is by a thousand internal and external constraints, which often cause confusion, frustration, even disbelief.

These are certainly not the feelings and attitudes that the Lord intends to arouse; rather, the Enemy, the Devil, takes advantage of them to isolate us in bitterness, in complaints, and in discouragement.

Jesus, the Good Shepherd, does not humiliate us or abandon us to remorse: in Him, the tenderness of the Father speaks, He who comforts and raises up; He who makes us pass from the disintegration of shame—because shame surely causes us to disintegrate—to the fabric of trust; who restores courage, recommits responsibility, and consigns us to the mission.

The entire address is available here.

The exercise combines elements of a rite of passage with characteristics of an endurance contest, pitting attendees against overheated (or overcooled) auditoriums, crowded lobbies, middle-aged men who don’t use Flomax, and small doorways unable to accommodate large crowds.

Also today, Santiago Ramos argues that appealing to Kant will not settle our arguments about sex:

This diversity is the reason why Kant’s pure reason would seem attractive for a situation like ours. But practically speaking, the Kantian approach will yield abstract moral injunctions that can be endlessly refined but don’t give us an adequate way “into” them, a way to appropriate them for our lives.

The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart: do good and do not do evil. All of us. “But, Father, this is not Catholic! He cannot do good.” Yes, he can. He must. Not can: must! Because he has this commandment within him. . . .

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! “Father, the atheists?” Even the atheists. Everyone! And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class! We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all! And we all have a duty to do good. . . . “But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!” But do good: we will meet one another there.

While some news reports suggested that these remarks are a departure from the theology of Pope Benedict, in reality Francis’ predecessor had made similar attempts to reach out to non-believers.

In fact, in one homily long prior to his papacy, then-Fr. Joseph Ratzinger had answered from the Christian perspective precisely the question that Pope Francis’ homily raised (if less reverently) in some circles of skeptics yesterday: If non-believers can go to heaven, why bother with faith at all? As Ratzinger said in that 1964 homily, the question we struggle with is not whether God can save people outside the Church (for we know that he can). Rather:

The question that torments us is . . . why, if there are so many other ways to heaven and to salvation, should it still be demanded of us that we bear, day by day, the whole burden of ecclesiastical dogma and ecclesiastical ethics? . . .

If we are raising the question of the basis and meaning of our life as Christians . . . then this can easily conceal a sidelong glance at what we suppose to be the easier and more comfortable life of other people, who will “also” get to heaven.

We are too much like the workers taken on in the first hour whom the Lord talks about in his parable of the workers in the vineyard (Mt 20:1-6). When they realized that the day’s wage of one denarius could be much more easily earned, they could no longer see why they had sweated all day. . . .

But the parable is not there on account of those workers at that time; it is there for our sake. For in our raising questions about the “why” of Christianity, we are doing just what those workers did. We are assuming that spiritual “unemployment”—a life without faith or prayer—is more pleasant than spiritual service. Yet how do we know that?

We are staring at the trials of everyday Christianity and forgetting on that account that faith is not just a burden that weighs us down; it is at the same time a light that brings us counsel, gives us a path to follow, and gives us meaning. We are seeing in the Church only the exterior order that limits our freedom and thereby overlooking the fact that she is our spiritual home, which shields us, keeps us safe in life and in death. We are seeing only our own burden and forgetting that other people also have burdens, even if we know nothing of them.

And above all, what a strange attitude that actually is, when we no longer find Christian service worthwhile if the denarius of salvation may be obtained even without it! It seems as if we want to be rewarded, not just with our own salvation, but most especially with other people’s damnation—just like the workers hired in the first hour. That is very human, but the Lord’s parable is particularly meant to make us quite aware of how profoundly un-Christian it is at the same time. Anyone who looks on the loss of salvation for others as the condition, as it were, on which he serves Christ will in the end only be able to turn away grumbling, because that kind of reward is contrary to the loving-kindness of God.

h/t Matthew Healey

“Christians are ousted wherever possible on campus,” complained Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru) founder Bill Bright a few years before his 2003 death.

With some regularity universities make news for de-recognizing student campus ministries that require their leaders to adhere to certain religious criteria (most often a statement of faith). This, a number of high-profile universities have maintained, violates policies of non-discrimination. In some instances, campus ministries have specifically excluded gay and lesbian students from positions of leadership; however, in the wake of the Christian Legal Society v. Martinez Supreme Court decision (2012), campus ministries have mostly abandoned such policies.

Last year, Vanderbilt University rescinded recognition from around a dozen Christian groups, including Cru, InterVarsity, and a Catholic student organization with five hundred members. The Vanderbilt case raised eyebrows for a number of reasons. The state legislature passed legislation intended to force the university to abandon its position, but the governor vetoed the bill. Also, it was noteworthy that while Vanderbilt expected religious groups to open their leadership positions to students of any faith (or no faith), Vanderbilt continued to allow certain student groups (namely fraternities and sororities) to discriminate on the basis of sex.

I’ve long been interested in this issue, partly because my own alma mater (Middlebury College) has had a sometimes contentious relationship with its InterVarsity chapter. Also, my first book (Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ) chronicled the story of how evangelical parachurch organizations became the most visible sign of religious activity at many large, public universities in the decades after World War II. In order to do so, organizations like Campus Crusade (not known for its diplomatic finesse in the 1950s and 1960s) had to struggle against both administrators and mainline campus ministries in order to gain access to students. Evangelicals succeeded because they went straight to the heart of campus life — to locker rooms, dormitories, and cafeterias. Access matters a great deal.

According to a recent report in the Christian Post, InterVarsity intends to file a complaint against its treatment by universities with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

I am not sure which way the wind is blowing on this issue. Campus ministries at private universities are probably going to face stiff tests in the years ahead. The CLS v. Martinez case seemed to augur poorly for campus ministries at public universities intent on upholding any policies of leadership exclusion. Nevertheless, the Christian Post reports that many universities have accommodated Christian organizations’ desire to uphold theological criteria for leadership: “[in] most cases, such as at Harvard and Rutgers, and more recently at the universities of Ohio State, Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland, and Tufts – college officials have amended their non-discrimination policies to permit religious student groups to use religious criteria in leadership selection.” I am pleased to read this, because it seems like a very reasonable solution and one that should satisfy nearly all parties. I would love to know what is happening elsewhere around the country.

Although I believe that policies like those adopted by Vanderbilt are baldly hypocritical and should be unconstitutional at least as long as the university permits other forms of discrimination, evangelical ministries would probably find ways to adapt to changed circumstances. Parachurch groups are, if anything, adaptive. In any event, such policies are wrong-headed. I imagine that many university administrators prefer to exclude conservative religious groups from campus simply because they espouse a very different set of values. If universities actually believe in the diversity they attempt to promote, they have to make room for evangelical, Catholic, Muslim, and the many other student religious organizations.

Cross-post at the Anxious Bench.

On the Suicide in Notre Dame Cathedral
Ed Peters, In the Light of the Law

A Yes to Worship
Emily Belz, World

Those Deleted Tweets
Tony Reinke, Desiring God

The Final Judgment and the Burial of the Bomber
Justin Hawkins, Fare Forward

Yahoo Sports reports that basketball player Kevin Durant had his tattoo finished. The religious tattoo covers Durant’s entire back and includes a basketball-wielding angel, a portrait of Christ, and a verse of scripture.

The scripture is James 1:2-4.

Consider it a sheer gift, friends, when tests and challenges come at you from all sides. You know that under pressure, your faith-life is forced into the open and shows its true colors. So don’t try to get out of anything prematurely. Let it do its work so you become mature and well-developed, not deficient in any way.

At least that’s what it’s supposed to say. It looks like the artist transposed the “t” and the “u” in “mature,” making “mautre.”

Durant will be able to put this verse into practice immediately. Consider your misspelled tattoos a sheer gift, friends. At least the challenge isn’t coming from “all sides.” It’s just coming from the back.

UPDATE [10:56 pm]:

Durant posted a new pic of the tattoo in which “mature” appears to be spelled correctly. It’s a little shiny, but it looks like a quick correction job.

A group of mostly Protestant and evangelical church leaders, representing churches with over 20 million members, are asking the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) National Council meeting this week to retain the current BSA stance on sexuality. The May 22-24 meeting will consider a proposal to prohibit “discrimination” based on “sexual orientation or preference,” while leaving in place the current prohibition on openly homosexual Scout leaders.

Signers of the appeal to BSA include Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, Lutheran Church Missouri Synod President Matthew Harrison, Assemblies of God General Superintendent George Wood, Church of God General (Cleveland, TN) Overseer Mark Williams, and Archbishop Robert Duncan of the Anglican Church in North America, as well as theologians like Southern Baptist Albert Mohler, United Methodist Thomas Oden, and Presbyterian Luder Whitlock.

Here is their statement, which attracted about fifty prominent signers:

We strongly support the Boy Scouts of America current prohibition on open homosexuality and retaining it without revision. Nearly 70 percent of BSA troops are hosted by churches and religious institutions. Upholding traditional morality is vital for sustaining this partnership, for protecting Scout members, and for ensuring BSA has a strong future. A proposal from the BSA board to prohibit “discrimination” based on “sexual orientation or preference” for BSA members potentially would open the Scouts to a wide range of open sexual expressions. In our current culture, it is more important than ever for our churches to protect and provide moral nurture for young people and for the Scouts. We implore members of the upcoming BSA Council to affirm the BSA’s present policy, which the U.S. Supreme Court has affirmed, and which has served BSA well.

In his own preamble to the statement, Rev. Harrison of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod warned the “proposed change will highlight sexuality, which has not been and should not be a matter of focus for Scouts.” And he suspects “it will make it more challenging to care for young people struggling with same-sex attraction and perhaps open our churches to legal action.” He also said the policy would supersede pastoral authority in churches with Scout units and could cause a “crisis of conscience for our church leaders, pastors, parents and congregations.” Harrison noted that “for more than a century, scouting has sought to uphold moral values at a level greater than that of general society,” and the “capitulation now to societal pressures would mar the long and honorable history of the Boy Scouts to honor the natural law of God, which at least for now, is still reflected in the current scouting membership policy.”

Richard Land, in his own separate May 15 letter to the Boy Scout leadership, warned that the proposed new policy would “cause many Southern Baptist churches, as well as many churches from other denominations, to withdraw their sponsorship rather than compromise their convictions.” He also said he was “perplexed” that the BSA “would abandon a century-old membership policy” less than a year after a 2 year study reaffirmed that policy “remains in the best interest of Scouting.”

In their own statement, the National Catholic Committee on Scouting cited Roman Catholicism’s teaching on chastity, and said the Church “reserves the right to seek to place those who live by its teachings in leadership positions that serve our youth, as well as the right to continue to call our young people to live by the teachings of our faith and by moral truth which can be known by all.”

Catholics are the third largest religious group involved in Scouting. Mormons are the most numerous, and their church effectively abstained from a public stance on the proposed new policy. United Methodists are the second most numerous, and their leaders in February asked BSA to defer any shift in policy until participating churches could review in a “thoughtful and prayerful manner.”

If the BSA National Council changes the membership policy, it will almost certainly create tensions between BSA and many of its participating religious congregations. Some may withdraw from BSA altogether and support religiously-based alternatives to Scouting. Meanwhile, many critics will not relent until BSA altogether abandons any restrictions on open sexual expression for members and leaders. The days of BSA as a culturally unifying icon are over, and BSA sadly will have to choose sides in the culture wars.

According to the accounts found in the Synoptic Gospels, the female disciples that travelled to Jesus’s tomb the first Easter morning expected nothing spectacular. They merely intended to finish preparing the corpse for its long-term entombment (Mark 16:1, Luke 24:1), a process that had been truncated due to the late hour of Jesus’s expiration and the impending approach of the Sabbath. These women had encountered death countless times in their lives and likely engaged in the task of preparing bodies for burial many times over. In the Roman Empire, where life expectancy hovered around thirty years-old and many children, especially in urban areas, died before age ten, preparing a body for burial was a mundane task.

Familiarity with death meant that resurrection possessed a considerable poignancy for the women, bringing a hope that countered the ubiquitous fear of death. As the good news spread, the first-century readers of the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (and most readers since) had an acute sense of what it meant that “the last enemy to be destroyed is death (1 Cor. 15:26, NRSV). Until Easter, death had been victorious, the destroyer of lives, families, and hope. But victory only tastes sweeter when defeat is the norm. For the first Christians, the news of Jesus’s victory over death as “the first fruits” (I Cor. 15:23) was sweet indeed.

Throughout the history of the world, most people—like the women at the tomb—encountered death on a near daily basis. Death’s brutality over the greater part of the last two millennia cast a long shadow over everyday life as disease, famine, and infant mortality claimed victim after victim. For Christians of yesteryear, this familiarity with the pungent reality of death brought the hope of resurrection into sharp relief, not just in old age, but at every stage of life.

By contrast, Americans have largely outsourced death and dying over the last 150 years, gradually banishing it from sight and thought. Coincidentally, over the same period, many American evangelical groups have adopted a near myopic emphasis on expiation in their discussions (and presentations) of the gospel message. In a culture that sanitizes death and dying while simultaneously and self-reflectively obsessing about guilt, the need for forgiveness trumps the need for resurrection.

In the past, the pervasive presence of death often stimulated rich, biblically-informed reflections on the good news of resurrection and its implications for the Christian life. In his great work On the Incarnation, Athanasius articulated the manner in which Jesus Christ overcame both the problem of sin and the consequence of sin—death—through his incarnation, life, death, and resurrection. Pastorally, Gregory the Great instructed neophyte priests regarding the spiritual care of the dying, and Robert Bellarmine spurred Christians to live in the light of death—not in fearfulness, but in faithfulness and joy. Artistically, John Donne’s famous poem “Death Be Not Proud” paints a picture of death’s emasculation in the face of resurrection. For centuries, familiarity with death gave Christian writers, pastors, theologians, and artists cause to address death and dying from a Christian perspective—not as an intellectual abstraction, but as tangible reality. Although an omnipresent human experience, the resurrection meant death held no power for Christians and therefore, they lived and died differently than other people. Rob Moll thinks they still should.

In his book, The Art of Dying: Living Fully into the Life to Come (IVP, 2010), Moll urges American Christians to re-familiarize themselves with death that we may revive the ars moriendi—the art of dying. Grounded in his own experience as a hospice care worker, Moll carries two related burdens throughout The Art of Dying. First, he desires each Christian’s death might once again become “an embodiment of a belief in God who has defeated death and will give life to our own mortal bodies (68).” Second, he urges congregations to once again take seriously cradle-to-grave ministry. Moll rightly assesses that the first cannot be accomplished without the second. Along the way, he gently rebukes contemporary evangelicalism’s propensity to follow the larger cultural trend of outsourcing end-of-life decisions to professionals. Wonderfully adept at their vocations, doctors, nurses, and other medical caretakers naturally think in terms of prolonging life, not dying well in light of the resurrection. Such is the purview of ministers, and ministers should reclaim such functions.

Moll’s exhortation comes at a propitious time. As the baby boomer generation ages, a surge in elderly congregants will provide a tremendous opportunity to American churches. In an age and culture where many of us will face both knowledge regarding our impending death as well as options regarding how to live the final days of our lives, the opportunity for ministry to the dying and by the dying increases exponentially. Moll exalts both, urging congregations to continue to allow critically ill patients to employ their gifts in service to the body while the body comes alongside those who are critically ill in order to minister to them. This provides “an opportunity for the dying and elderly to continue to fulfill the ministry to which God has called them, but the rest of congregation sees life lived and ended with hope and faithfulness (169).” And a life ended with hope and faithfulness proclaims the resurrection in ways a sermon or liturgical service never can. As a result, every pastor and seminary student in America should read The Art of Dying, mulling over it carefully.

See also: “Outsourcing Death”

Cross-post at the Anxious Bench.

God’s Sovereignty and Personal Compassion in Public Tragedy
Tony Reinke, Desiring God

Ben Carson and the Marriage Police
Michael Kinsley, New Republic

Ed Koch’s Catholic Sendoff
Jonathan R. Cohen, Tablet

Sin and the Distorted Image
Jim Tonkowich, Juicy Ecumenism

Footsteps is a Jewish organization that helps Hasidic Jews wishing to leave their ultra-orthodox community become integrated members of secular society and work through the profound difficulties of leaving behind their past and, in most cases, being disowned by their families.

PBS and A Journey Through NYC Religions report the varying responses of current members of the Hasidic community and individuals who have chosen a new way of life.

Sol Feuerwerker is glad he left.

I think that’s what surprises most people, you know, most outsiders, is that how can something this insular be happening right here in the middle of New York City. You know, as I’ve moved farther away from it, it kind of shocks me too actually.

There’s this whole, like belief or narrative in the community that if you, if you try to break away or change you will fail and you won’t be happy and you’ll just end up on drugs.

“Their structured lifestyle,” says Lucky Severson of Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, “seems to work for the majority. But, for some, the lack of choices is too rigid . . . Hasidic groups remain some of the most insular religious sects in the U.S.”

Of course, many outsiders view the Catholic and Protestant churches, and even not-so-orthodox religious communities as “insular.” Any group that asks certain loyalties of its members and sets itself apart from the rest of the world is in some way “insular.” By this definition every sovereign country is “insular.” And the idea that a member who leaves “will fail” and “won’t be happy” holds much truth. The kind of suffering caused by such a break is no small matter.

As Samuel Heilman, a Jewish scholar at Queens College, notes,

They have everything that makes up a culture: social norms, language, a career pattern in life. Even the ones who leave say that there are aspects of their lives that they left behind that they miss. To go to a Hasidic gathering and to sing the songs and to dance in the circle and to be enfolded into the community, and to hear your voice in a chorus of other voices. This is a tremendously exciting experience . . .