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I’m in a high school classroom talking to Lisa. (I’ve changed her name and the names of all the students mentioned in this article.) Lisa’s hair is dyed black and purple, and she has numerous piercings, including one in her lower lip that bounces as she talks to me. “I broke up with my boyfriend …
Article
While Christianity is increasingly reticent to masquerade as sociology or psychology, the finding of these disciplines still remain significant for the church. A recent example is the Girl Scouts Survey, a nationwide sampling of the moral and spiritual perspectives of some 5,000 children and adolescents in grades 4-12. It provides some revealing and at times …
Continue reading “Adolescents’ Moral Compass, Adults’ Moral Presence”
Article
My daughter and son-in-law have built their home way back in the Appalachian hills of West Virginia. With their own hands they built it, helped by a few relatives and college chums pitching in sporadically during summer vacations. It’s a lovely place, hidden in a valley with just enough flatland to support a few cows, …
Continue reading “Bible Stories, Literalists and the Sunday School”
Book Chapter
Different cultures interpret different events from different perspectives. How does one communicate a belief to a strange culture without introducing one’s own presuppositions?
Book Chapter
The language-game concept is helpful as we try to understand ways of thinking in other cultures, not only primitive ones or those foreign to us but also the subcultures in our own country. Miller suggests practical applications — engaging in dialogue, clarifying the nature of the Gospel, and developing worship and education.
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The writings of F.S.C. Northrop, Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne and their assumptions about knowledge and metaphysics, with special attention to Whitehead’s aims of education.
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A discussion of the values of demythologizing, especially for children. It is essential to avoid the tendency of large numbers of people to take many of the biblical stories literally.
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Christian education needs to be implemented at all levels of thinking and action, but especially in the realm of supernatural revealed theology. This involves some kind of empirical grounding for religious assertions if the language of faith is to be meaningful.
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Dr. Miller turns to Horace Bushnell and Frances H. Drinkwater, who have similar positions to his own in “The Language of the Heart.” There are “poem forms” in the gospel and expressions of belief, that are more than technical language.
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Very little talk about God is possible when one is limited to descriptive language and assertions that can be empirically validated. Most religious language makes use of other categories, and it is important to know which language-game one is using and how language-games may be mixed.
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An examination of the nature of bliks and onlooks (personality structures) in terms of the ways in which they may or may not be shared or changed.
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A world view (metaphysics) is significant for religion because it provides a basis for our understanding of the universe around us, for our acceptance of the world of sense experience, and for our capacity to look on the world as God’s world. It is an “onlook,” and therefore is performative and self-involving.
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ducation is so highly verbal that distinctions need to be made between models of language use that will clarify the issues and make intelligence a competent factor in religious thinking. There is more to Christian education than this, but no one can get far unless it is known how to use words and what they mean.
Article
This is the twelfth in a series on New Turns in Religious Thought. It is a truism that Christian faith and education are inevitable companions. Wherever living faith exists, there is a community endeavoring to sustain and transmit that faith. Still, an accurate description of education in the church today is almost impossible. Generalizations are …
Article
As master of the Temple Church in London, one of the sites featured in The Da Vinci Code, Robin Griffith-Jones has had the chance to talk to hundreds of people about the claims of the best-selling novel. His book on the topic, The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of the Temple (just published by …
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BOOK REVIEW: Beyond Clericalism: The Congregation as a Focus for Theological Education. Edited by Joseph Hough, Jr., and Barbara G. Wheeler. Scholars Press, 151 pp., $28.95; paperback, $18.95.
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We approach this study with a basic assumption: that being religious is being human. When people believe in God, pray before the wailing wall in Jerusalem, struggle to escape the cycles of existence, handle poisonous snakes, join religious orders, or spend their time pondering so-called religious questions, they are doing something characteristically human. That may …
Article
I am a storyteller whose themes are informed by faith, but I do not preach it. In fact, one reader mailed back one of my novels complaining that it was filthy; with a magic marker she had blacked out everything she found offensive. When I saw that the first casualty was the mere mention of …
Continue reading “Everything I Know About Writing I Learned in Sunday School”
Article
Cramming more than 50 high school students into a small room for weekly Bible study is challenging, but getting them to talk about sex is not. When the questioning hand of one 15-year-old boy shot up in the back of the room, I braced myself. "Is masturbation a sin? — I really gotta know." I …
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There are signs that the Sunday school, which once seemed dead or dying in many mainline churches, is on the verge of new life. At least one denomination, the United Methodist Church, reports that the downward trend in attendance has been baited and that recovery, though slight, has begun. If this is evidence of a …
Article
Karl Barth famously attacked apologetics–the attempt to offer a persuasive account of Christian belief on mutually agreed-upon grounds of reason–as a misguided task, part of the failure of theological liberalism. When you focus on making sense to those outside the faith, Barth warned, you end up adopting their worldview. When you lean way over to …
Article
Though I could not have known it at the time, a momentous event in my faith journey occurred on a Sunday evening in 1963 in Greenville, South Carolina, when, in defiance of the state’s archaic Blue Laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us — regular attenders at the Methodist Youth Fellowship at …
Book Chapter
The influence of Western technological culture has infiltrated the thinking of educated people throughout the world. The categories of secular concepts are used to explain everything from repairing a bicycle to interpreting the scriptures.
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I am five or six one summer, and I go to Bible school at the Methodist church in my hometown. Later I won’t remember much of what we do except the coloring: every day we color pictures of Jesus knocking on doors, turning water into wine, helping the lame to walk; the pictures have (unreadable, …
Article
Some years ago a young woman who had confessed to cheating on an exam came by my office to say that she didn’t think she should be suspended because she hadn’t meant any harm. I said: "Mary, there’s not an awful lot I can do about it. The institution has certain standards, and I would …
Article
As I met with the Christian education committee that evening, I could not hide my displeasure at the thought of spending three long months of Thursday afternoons trapped with a group of unwilling teen-agers in our annual confirmation class. Despite my earnest efforts to make sessions on the sacraments, church history, the Bible, ethics and …
Article
Several years ago, while serving as minister of a congregation in Hawaii, I had frequent opportunity to observe a karate school that used our fellowship hall. I began to notice that this school taught much more than how to strike blows–indeed, that may have been the least of it. The instructor taught the students to …
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The word truthiness was named Word of the Year for 2005 by the American Dialect Society. It was also recognized by the New York Times as one of nine words defining the spirit of the age. But in fact (Is there still such a thing as "fact"? Do we care?), truthiness has been around since …
Article
One thing is certain. Change. But too much change, coming too fast and too soon, can shake and shatter our lives, leaving many of us confused and unable to cope. "Nobody," argued Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, "can be pushed above his adaptive range without suffering disturbance and disorientation." And it’s clear that "disturbance and …
Article
The important question about youth ministry is not "Where are the kids?" or "What should we do with them when they show up?" but "What is the nature of our community?" What are the discipleship skills appropriate to those who have moved beyond childhood, and how can a community exhibit those skills in a way …
Book
ENTIRE BOOK The problem of communicating Christian teaching — especially the use of language in bible study. How can we say what we mean about God so that our assertions will be understood, accepted, and responded to?
Article
One has to be somewhat mad to accept a request to write on the future of the Sunday school. Those who have given it a try in the past succeeded only in revealing their own prejudices or desires. Though historians have ignored it and futurists have predicted its demise, the Sunday school has made its …
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From history, it is said, we learn that we do not learn from history. But for us to learn even that much, there must be some written history. Humans do not have a memory beyond their own mind, and that does not stretch back sufficiently far to be of use for many social purposes, nor …
Article
You pays your money and you takes your choice." Several generations of students at Duke Divinity School have heard James "Mickey" Efird use those carnivalesque words to conclude debates over the meaning of a biblical passage. The words take on a new resonance now that students of the Bible can pay their money and receive …
Article
Some years ago, when I was teaching at a theological seminary in South Africa, I had a very peculiar experience; as with the bear in James Thurber’s “bear that could take it or leave it alone,” the experience was somewhat more frightening to my colleagues than is my normal, somewhat cynical self. To put it …
Article
Visit any mainline Sunday school class and you will probably find only a smattering of adults and high school students. The students will seem bored and uninvolved, the teacher burned out and ill-equipped. Then follow some church members through the week. Few will show any signs that they are Christians. They won’t read their Bibles …
