MetaCatholic

While my blog’s been down there’ve been a number of posts I would have liked to comment on or interact with. So, as a weekend round-up, I want to especially commend or draw attention to these.

1. Two posts by John Hobbins have caught my eye. he has something very important to say about genuine inter-faith dialogue. He also has an interesting challenge to C Michael Patton’s take on a fallible collection of infallible scriptures. (This was also a post that I had found very interesting). One of the questions I have is whether the kind of open-ended dialogue John wants to see in inter-faith conversation is any longer possible between fellow evangelicals. Here two open-minded and generous people in the evangelical tradition might give it a go.
2. Ben Witherington joins the Jim West Wikipedia Un-appreciation Society with a blast about the use students make of it. Apparently he’s shocked that anyone can edit it, and not always in a truthful direction. I still stand with those like Mark Goodacre who think it has its place and value.
3. Suzanne McCarthy has an important reminder of the value of reading scripture aloud. Amen. And I would add to that an argument that the primary mode of reading scripture is aloud in the assembly gathered for worship. To complement this Iyov has a great round-up of mp3 Bibles.
4. Mark Goodacre has some good comments on Scot McKnight’s series on the Historical Jesus Quest. There are also some good comments on his post, including McKnight’s. Read it all. While I tend to agree with many of Mark’s comments, I am in broad agreement with what I take to be one of Scot McKnight’s main points: that you cannot identify any one historical reconstruction with the “real Jesus.” The most you can do is allow good historical reconstruction to inform the ways in which the canonical gospels mediate access to the real Jesus who is also encountered in sacrament, prayer and action.
5. On a lighter note, my thanks to Jim West for pointing me in the direction of the 5 second Harry Potter. It’s great, but a good many other of the “5 second” movies are also well worth catching. Try The Matrix in 5 seconds as well.
6. Finally, welcome back to Deinde, now with friends.

Hope I’m more-or-less caught up now.

My apologies to anyone who’s tried to locate a post on this blog over the last 48 hours. My hosting server has been down and there were problems with restoring the backup. Everything till last Sunday (13 Aug) has now been fully restored. However, while I was able to restore posts between Sunday and Thursday, when the server went down, I have been unable to restore any of the comments on those posts, which are unfortunately lost for ever. So if your comment has disappeared, you haven’t been censored, you’ve just been the victim of an unfortunate accident. My apologies to you in particular.

I hope that my host has now resolved all these problems (they’ve actually been very helpful with circumstances beyond their control). I may need to get into the habit of backing up more than once a week.