Marginal Christianity

Romans 12:1-2 12  1-2  So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.   (The Message) First Sunday in Lent Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. The first step of God-helped action Paul advises is to make an offering to God of our “walking-around life.” Not our “spiritual” l...

  Earth is Just Our Temporary Home It’s Plato’s Fault           If you think that earth is just our temporary home and we have something better, much better, awaiting us with God in heaven, well . . . whether you know it or not you have Plato to thank for it. Yes, Plato. The ancient Greek philosopher. He’s the one that taught us to divide the world into two realms. A material one, inferior, constraining and keeping us from realizing our true selves. Those true selves are spiritual and really belong to a spiritual realm which, inward and immaterial, is superior to the material realm and to be preferred in every way. He envisioned the body as the prison of the soul which our true selves can finally flee at death and return to their true home.           This idea of the two realms, the material and the spiritual, called dualism, has become so ingrained in our cultural tradition that ...