I always appreciate little language nuggets and interesting things I haven’t thought about. While they are rather scarce among us, here are a few I’ve run across (trigger alert: political hot topics included):
Let’s face it: the Roy Moore situation is a sticky wicket. This from Fox News contributor and Southeastern Seminary Provost Bruce Ashford. I like the metaphor, sticky wicket, and am a bit of an anglophile myself, but what is it about these seminary profs and their affection for British figures and language? We’re talking cricket here, a game no American has ever seen. We improved that into baseball, a game where no one watches the whole thing. Sticky wicket is, though, generally understood in the former colonies but how about, “we’re caught in a pickle.” Good American baseball. Ashford gets high marks for his earlier Fox article that described Trump’s positions as overheated ethnonationalistic aggression. Excellent.
“the perspecuity of Scripture is clear” Redundancy unleashed. But you bet it is, although the perspecuity of some commentators of Scripture is not.
“dating suggests that the Edicule is a much older structure” So the mortar from the little chapel (Edicule) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is older than thought, dating back to the time of Constantine? Take that, Garden Tomb. You’re just a tourist trap.
The Wartburg blog queens sayeth, you can’t put a soul in a test tube. Indeed, and nice phrase. This referring to the lack of empirical evidence of the efficacy of nouthetic counseling, a lack which even proponents freely admit. When astute laypeople offer honest, informed commentary on the operation of some Christian organizations, they should be heard. The sooner the pastor, or counselor, looks at a troubled individual as a real, living soul rather than a petri dish, a package of issues to be solved, or a possible sale to be closed, the more biblical he is.
…this ever-deepening, soul-sucking rabbit hole of identity politics. This is where older, conservative members of an Alabama Southern Baptist congregation seem to be disappearing according to their youngerish pastor, so quoted in a New Yorker article, Roy Moore and the Invisible Religious Right. I don’t mind a mixed metaphor (OK, you draw a picture of a soul-sucking rabbit hole) when I know exactly what it means. In the same article the author was told by unnamed leaders in the Alabama Southern Baptist Church (presumably the ABSBOM) that …not a single affiliated Southern Baptist pastor in the state was openly allied with Moore. “Openly” would be the operative word in that sentence.
…singing only the first verse of familiar carols could leave worshipers spiritually malnourished. So delcared the worship leader of one Georgia Baptist church in a Baptist Press article. He had in mind more than the first verse of Joy to the World and advocated for not dropping the third verse, ‘No more let sin and sorrow grow, nor thorns infest the ground. He comes to make His blessings flow far as the curse is found.’ I agree. I also agree that the heavily jazzed and jacked-up version of many popular carols is a disgrace. Put the doggone drums up for a Sunday. Bah! Humbug!
We get educated on foot-binding about this time each year, that is, if you are in a church that promotes the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. This IMB writer offers a contemporary update on that deplorable and thankfully discarded practice. This is an article that is painful to read. Read it.
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I’m voting for the Edicule and giving to Lottie Moon. I would watch a whole nine innings of baseball if the only other choice was to jump down a soul-sucking rabbit hole.
