Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Donald Bloesch: An Appreciation


Theologian Donald Bloesch died a week ago at the age of 82. His friend and colleague Gabriel Fackre paid tribute to him in Christianity Today and commented that he was “underappreciated in his lifetime.”

His denomination (and mine), the United Church of Christ, certainly never paid him much heed. Fackre said, “Don was never given the recognition due to him in the UCC because he was a feisty critic of the liberal establishment. We both were doing our best in the United Church of Christ to call it back to its original ecumenical vision.”

But whether he got the recognition he deserved or not in the United Church of Christ, he never left it, and in doing so he embodied a steadfast commitment to church that reflected his own deep catholicity. In this regard he was an evangelical catholic in the best sense of the word, but he defied easy labels. He himself used such dialectical phrases as “progressive evangelical,” and “Ecumenical orthodox” to describe himself.

He called himself an evangelical theologian and he was on the board of Christianity Today to prove it, but he was never at home with the obscurantism and anti-intellectualism that so often attached itself to the label evangelical.

He came by the term honestly, since he was actually a big E evangelical, being born into the Evangelical Church, where his father and both his grandfathers were ordained ministers. The current minister of the First Evangelical Church in Bremen Indiana found his baptismal records. The records state: Donald George Bloesch, born, May 3, 1928, baptized, June 24, 1928. His father Herbert Bloesch was pastor there at the time.

The Evangelical Church (which joined with the German Reformed in 1934 to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church) was a German immigrant church with a lively combination of theological rigor and deep piety that clearly shaped Bloesch’s own approach to his theological projects.

In 1957 the E and R joined with the Congregational Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ and that became Bloesch’s church until he died.

Bloesch was actively involved in theological renewal movements in the United Church of Christ, and wrote the Dubuque Declaration, which became the statement of faith of the Biblical Witness Fellowship.

I think of Bloesch as an accessible interpreter of large theological ideas. He introduced many evangelicals to the thought of Karl Barth, a figure often viewed with suspicion in their camp, and to P.T. Forsyth, the great British pastor theologian of the cross. Bloesch brought fresh readings to these and other figures. His writing is easy to read and infused with a warm-hearted piety. Like Barth and Forsyth he wrote primarily for the church, not the academy, and he knew that fruitful theology grows best in the rich soil of active church life and personal piety (what today we, but not he, would call “spirituality.”)

Another corrective Bloesch’s theology offers to his evangelical brothers and sisters is an appreciation of the length and breadth of the church, that is, tradition and ecumenism. Fackre notes in the CT article that scholars as diverse as Roman Catholic Cardinal Avery Dulles and Reformed theologian T.F. Torrance paid tribute to Bloesch in the 1999 festschrift volume Evangelical Theology in Transition.

I am proud that he was a theologian in my denomination, and grateful for his contribution to the great church which he loved.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Ruminations on Burnout: “Should clergy really be ‘working?’”


Clergy burnout is a hot topic now. My two most popular posts of late have been been Pastors in Peril, and the snarky satirical Ten Highly Efficient Strategies for Crushing Your Pastors Morale.

And when the New York Times notices religion at all it is usually some aspect of it that is aberrant or weird, but, lo, there have been a couple of articles this month on clergy burnout. For a compendium of recent articles on burnout in the media and blogosphere you can go here to Jason Goroncy’s ever-dependable site Per Crucem ad Lucem, where he is doing a series on clergy burnout.

It is a vast topic to cover, but here is one of my small ruminations:

I think the whole category of “burnout,” although quite real, is also a bit of a red herring. All the articles agree that clergy are overworked. And when cast in terms of “work” that is undoubtedly true.

My question is simple: “Should clergy really be working?” Or to put it another way, “When did what clergy do come to be understood as work?” Clergy have always been busy doing what clergy do, visiting the sick, attending to the dying, preaching and administering the sacraments and the scholarly preparation for same. The “work” clergy are now expected to do is a category drawn from the industrial and post industrial West, and seen in terms of their terms of efficiency, productivity, and professionalism.

I submit that this is a category error, and that the expectations of this category are one of the causes for burnout. On reflection I realize that an embarrassing amount of the “work” I did in my over thirty years in pastoral ministry was designed to give the appearance of being effective, productive and professional, to my congregants, the greater community, and to myself.

And I think many clergy share this loss of confidence about their core identity and engage in “the sin of bustle” (P.T. Forsyth) to convince the world that they are useful, valued, and worthy of the high social status to which they aspire.

Years ago one of my GE manager types got on my oversight board and hounded me into doing detailed hourly logs of what I do as part of a compensation review (I know this sounds like Dante, but it really happened.) I was insecure enough to hold my doubts and my tongue, and dutifully filled them out, but a good deal of the time I found myself in comic reflection. For example, when I was thinking about whether Paul’s radical theology of justification in Romans led to antinomianism while soaping up in the shower, was I “working?”  Or am I working right now while I ruminate, for I have no position and am not being compensated for it?

My point is that the role of clergy is not something you put on and take off like a cloak. The clergyperson was once the “the parson” (person), and embodied the church in some way. We reject that model because it was patriarchal and hierarchical, and with good reason, but we have lost something as well. Ordination was never about the intrinsic qualities of the ordained. All the way back to the Donatist crisis the church asserted, “The efficacy of the sacrament does not depend on the sanctity of the celebrant.”

That is to say that ordination was never about the gifts and graces of the ordained, no matter how impressive. Rather ordination was the church conferring authority and its requisite graces on the ordained for the good of the church. When we lost the model of embodiment for clergy we turned to function, and looked around for models from the society. That is where we are today. Now there have been many good things to come out of the professionalism of the clergy, but much has been lost.

It seems to me no accident that the declining mainline clergy are much more preoccupied with compensation and various “work” related protocols than the more robust evangelical and Pentecostal churches. In my own United Church of Christ we have compensation recommendations based on seniority, experience, size of congregations, and all the measures that corporate America would value. The result of this is that we have priced many small congregations out of full-time ministry, and discouraged  many talented clergy who feel called to serve these churches from doing so.

We also have guidelines for how many hours (divided into parts of days called “units”) that pastors should be “working.” Like so many things in our churches these suggestions are right-minded but wrongheaded. Because ministry can’t be cut into tranches like pate.

The category of burnout is a symptom of what happens when you take on these models. If your criteria for “success” is efficiency and productivity you will always fall short, because ministry is neither efficient nor productive in the terms of the world.

The real measure of ministry is faithfulness, because the ministry belongs to God, and God is famously difficult to evaluate. Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gives the growth.” Ministry is about planting and watering. We seldom see our results.

The attempt to quantify the “work” of ministry fails before it begins, because it is based on a secular model. Look at how we talk about it: The pastor goes to the “office” (not the study), and keeps “office hours.” And how is the pastor deemed “successful?” By how much money is raised? By how many new members are brought in? Are these the real measure of the dominion of God?

How many faithful mainline ministers in demographically unfruitful vineyards have cast a covetous eye on thriving churches in more fertile spots? Or at their evangelical brothers and sisters? How many have secretly perused a brochure for a Willow Creek or Schuller workshop on church growth when the door to their “office” was closed. And how many have accepted growth strategies and practices that neither their hearts nor their theologies truly believe in?

This is some of the climate in which clergy burnout, by whatever name, flourishes. Because if one ceases to believe in the integrity and importance of what you are doing, than it doesn’t take too much “work” for it to seem like too much. And conversely, clergy who know what they are doing and love doing it would seldom describe their busy lives by the word burnout.   Paul describes his various trials and tribulations, which could match any modern pastor for being overworked and undervalued. But he saw his ministry as a sharing in the ministry of Christ, including his cross, and rather than being burned out he could rejoice in his afflictions.

So it is not just about how much a cost we pay to do our ministry, for faithful ministry always comes with a personal cost, but whether we believe in what we are called to do, and know what we are doing and why we are doing it.

It is like the old joke about the pilot who comes on the intercom and announces to the passengers, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news! The good news is that we are making great time. The bad news is that we are lost.”

The good news is that clergy are working harder than ever. The bad news is that they are burned out. Because when you don’t know what you are doing, you don’t know when you have done it.

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Religious Freedom: Which narrative will prove true?


Americans are justly proud of our freedoms, and near the top of the list is freedom of religion. The first amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof.” Article VI prohibits religious tests for public office. A rich diversity of religious faiths, unprecedented in human history, have lived together in our land and shared a vision of America as a safe social space for the free practice of religion.

That is the dominant national narrative, but it is only half the story. If you look at the history of our country closely you can’t help but notice a counter-narrative, one in which religious bigotry is as American as apple pie. For example, the “nativist’ movement which arose in the 1840’s in response to an influx of Roman Catholic immigrants from Europe. It culminated in the (aptly named) “Know-Nothing Party,” who ran the former President Millard Fillmore for President (he lost.)

The result of this climate of fear was a disgraceful period that saw periodic mob violence, churches burned down, and some Catholics killed. The rhetoric was alarmingly similar to some of what you hear today about immigrants, that they threaten the culture of the country, and about Muslims, that their religious beliefs are incompatible with the American way of life.

In the 1920’s the anti-Catholics, including the Ku Klux Klan, claimed that Catholicism was incompatible with democracy. At that time, the response of the Catholic Church was that the nativists didn’t represent American values as much as they did, since the Catholics believed in freedom of religion. They had a point.

Roman Catholics today are in the mainstream of American life, and constitute the largest Christian denomination in the country by far. It is hard for young people to imagine the rancor created by the presidential campaign of Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, in 1928, or of John F. Kennedy in 1960. In the dominant narrative those ugly nativist impulses in our national psyche have been put behind us.

Sadly, this seems not to be so. The perfect storm of a national immigration crisis and a recession have rekindled atavistic tendencies to fear and hate the Other. In the case of immigration this is not generally cast today in primarily religious terms, as many immigrants are Catholic.

But the raging debate over the proposed Islamic Center in New York shows that religious bigotry lives on. Is every one who opposes the building of this center a bigot? Certainly not. But the conversation is salted with enough starkly anti-Muslim rhetoric to disturb anyone who believes that freedom of religion is a cherished feature of our national identity.

In American life we do not have to like all religions, or believe that they are all true, but we do have to allow them the same freedoms we have to their beliefs and worship practices. The current debate, cravenly inflamed for political purposes, is really about which narrative will be found to be true about us. Are we peaceful, tolerant and generous, or are we fearful, hateful and selfish? Will we be American patriots, touched by “the better angels of our nature?” Or will we be “Know Nothings?” These questions hang in the air.

(Picture:   Roger Williams)

Friday, August 20, 2010

New poll: One out of Four Americans is not paying attention!



Against all the facts, 25 % of Americans believe that President Obama is a Muslim, according to a new poll. It is hard for me to find the words to express how discouraging that piece of information is.

I have it on good authority from reliable personal contacts that President Obama and his family were members and regular attenders at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which happens to be the largest congregation in my denomination, the United Church of Christ.  Yes, that is a Christian Church.  The members of such churches are Christians.

The Obamas would probably still be members there if Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor, hadn’t got off his talking points and scared many of the electorate during the campaign.

That the Obamas have not found a church home in Washington, D.C. may be a result of the painful memories of the Wright incident, when the 24/7 news media scoured Wright’s sermons for evidence against the candidate. That some of the phrases they took out of context sounded very much like the kind of thing that many of us preachers have often said from the pulpit made them sound no less scary when played back on Fox “News” (sic).

Like Supreme Court nominees who do best to have no record to derail their nomination it may be prudent for a president of the Untied States to detach himself from church membership to avoid defending every jot and tiddle spoken from the pulpit of his church.

The irony now is that the Obama campaign nearly got derailed when the media portrayed his Christian pastor as being a loose cannon, but apparently a good 25% percent of the electorate never even heard about it. Or maybe they forgot, which is even more discouraging. So I don't know, I must conclude that one in four Americans is just not paying attention.

But one thing I do know for sure, the right wing demagogues, and the benighted citizens who pay attention to them can’t have it both ways. President Obama can’t be BOTH a Christian with a dangerously unstable former pastor and be a Muslim. He just can’t.

Monday, August 9, 2010

Ten Theses about Interim Ministry



1. The chief purpose of long interim ministries is to provide a regular supply of jobs for ministers who are unwilling or unable to take a settled pastorate.  This is not a good thing.  Although a good interim minister can be a gift to a congregation, he or she is no substitute for a settled pastor.  Interims work to contract, they often don't live in the communities they serve, and they are not going to stay.  It is a different kind of ministry, and the longer a church has an interim minister the longer it is deprived of the covenantal relationship that comes with having a called and settled minister.

2. During my 30 years in the ministry the length of interim ministries has expanded from a few months to two or three years (or more.) Meanwhile settled ministries are getting shorter, so the only difference seems to be less accountability on the part of the interim minister. Many seem to prefer it that way.

3. Interim ministers were once typically retired experienced pastors who preached, did pastoral care, and kept a light hand on the organization while the congregation sought a new settled pastor.

4. Today, interim ministers lead elaborate congregational self-studies, change the structures, rewrite the by-laws, and generally move the furniture around in ways that were once considered to be the job of a settled leader.

5. The reason that the extended length and the frenetic re-shuffling of interim ministry is justified as necessary is because the leave-taking of a pastor is considered to be such a trauma that only expert interim leadership can help the congregation heal from it and prepare for new leadership. It is true that there are such traumatic situations, such as the death of a pastor, cases of clergy abuse or misconduct, or where there has been profound conflict. These situations may well call for extended interims. But the new model for interim ministry assumes that every transition needs such a long and intense interim. They do not. Why then are all interims expected to be so long? See #1.

6. The model for much interim ministry is a family system model where congregations are seen as dysfunctional systems and the former pastor (actually called the BFP “beloved former pastor” in some interim training) is seen as the problem. Sometimes this is true. Usually it is not, but the one-size-fits all template is demeaning to former pastors who have served faithfully. One must wonder if it can be possible that every pastor’s predecessor was incompetent, lazy, controlling or evil.

7. Long interims frequently dissipate the momentum of many church programs, make the congregation feel adrift, lose the allegiance of many long-term members, and often leave the new settled pastor with a much-diminished congregation. This scorched-earth policy allows for little continuity between pastorates, and means the new pastor often must “re-invent the wheel” in a new setting.

8. Interim ministers have their own networks, and often work outside the existing judicatory processes. They can and often do function as a free-floating class of paladins for hire that raises fundamental questions about the meaning of ordination and the accountability of the ordained.  Ordaining someone to interim ministry is a (new) practice that needs serious scrutiny.

9. Because the models of interim ministry are derived largely from psycho-social systems theory and/or corporate management models they have little regard for the church’s own grammar of how to be church. These interim models are very thin on the ground when it comes to theology. This mirrors a general trend in ministry toward professional identity over the ancient churchly arts of soul-craft and ministry of the Word of God.

10. Lay persons in leadership during a time of pastoral transition are well-advised to carefully query potential interim ministers about their model of interim ministry. Question the assumption that every church needs a two or three year interim. Maybe you do, but ask why? Ask if the interim is planning on doing a lot of restructuring, and if so, why? The congregation should decide what it needs from an interim, and not hire an interim to tell it what it needs from him or her. An interim is just that, an interim who gets you through a period to allow the “search and call” process to take place. The rule of an interim should be like a doctor: “Do no harm.” A good interim will leave a small footprint.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Disability and Grace



Ten years ago tomorrow I went over the handlebars of my bicycle and landed on my head.  I have written about that day elsewhere.  Since that time I have been grappling daily with being brain injured.  Of course, before that day I grappled daily with being human, an enterprise that continues, but brain injury complicates it considerably.

In fact, “a complication” has been a useful way for me to think about brain injury.  My injury is, of course, in common parlance, “a disability,” and the Social Security Administration has recognized mine as such.  It is a credential I would have preferred not to have needed, but it makes me officially disabled.

Yet, I don’t really think of myself as a disabled person, any more than I think of myself primarily as a white person, an ordained person, or a male person.  All these realities inform my identity but do not, even in the aggregate, constitute it.

I have always had an allergy to identity politics, and question whether it is helpful for one to think of oneself as primarily identified by race, gender, sexual orientation, or for that matter, disability.  If pressed for an identity I would pick a really big one, such as “created in the image of God,” and its new creation correlate, baptism.  I say this because I believe that any identity that ignores our relationship with God is bound to be too narrow, and lead to some form of self-deception.

But I understand why people with disabilities often choose to make their disability a primary identity, because other people certainly use disability as a social marker, just as they do for race and gender.  If you are in a wheelchair or walk or speak differently that will be part of what defines you. And many people can’t look beyond the obvious.  People have a fear of disability, that if that can happen to you, it could happen to them.  I think there is also a tendency to distance oneself from the disabled by blaming them for their disabilities.  They must have brought it on themselves by bad behaviors.  This helps us maintain the illusion that we can have control over protecting ourselves from becoming disabled by being careful.  And sometimes it is true that persons acquire disabilities from poor life choices, but most times that is not true.

My disabilities are largely hidden, since I am able to walk and speak.  Nonetheless, enough people in my community know about my accident and its aftermath that I find myself in awkward social situations where people aren’t sure how to approach me.  My memory is largely unimpaired (and was good to begin with), but the assumption is that brain injury is largely about memory loss, so I find myself in these painful (and sometimes comical) encounters in the supermarket where people are trying to tell me a story but filling in huge amounts of unnecessary back-story (like the names of their kids that I baptized and have known for over twenty years.)  Others talk really slowly and enunciate carefully, and I must resist the temptation to say, “I’m brain injured, not stupid.”

Many people just want me to recover and be better, though I will always have a brain injury.  “How are you doing?” they ask empathically and I really want to say fine, but, of course, I am not fine, so I resort to something like, “I am doing OK.”  Sometimes I say, “For a man in my condition, I’m in great condition.”

A lot of dealing with injury is self-care, and it is frustrating how much of my time and energy goes into just keeping healthy.  There are many things I could once do but now cannot.  One of the reasons I resist disability as a primary identity is the temptation to use it as an excuse to do less than I can.  For I can still do many things, and need to do them, even when it is hard.  The daily challenge is to find the sweet spot between too much and too little activity, and of course, when you live with others, this balance is not always completely under your control.  Sometimes I choose to overdo just because the thing I choose is important enough to me to pay a price for several days.  But I can only do so much of that or I risk my health, which is easier to protect than to restore.

There is also a level of dependency involved with disability that is very hard for me.  I rely on my wife and children and family for love and support and a great deal of care-giving.  So in some very real sense my injury is a family affair, something that has to be factored in to all our interactions.  I want to be strong and brave and independent, but have to face my reliance on others.  The positive part of this is that I often experience their care for me as grace, that is, as something freely given though undeserved.  And I am often in awe of their patience and forbearance with me, for I am not always the easiest person to be around, especially when I am tired, which is much of the time.

Even before the accident I was powerfully moved by the pathos at the heart of the Christian story:  how God’s power is made manifest in the weakness of the cross of Jesus Christ.  I have recounted often before that my mother died when I was 18, and that my return to Christian faith as a young adult was the result of a struggle to make sense of a world where such losses (and others) take place.  It shouldn’t be a surprise that I became a theologian of the cross, which I see, not as a symbol of violence and brutality, but as the place where God’s reconciling love encountered human sin and overcame it.

These last ten years have made me more acutely aware that faith lives in the midst of weakness.  Disability has sharpened that awareness for me, but one doesn’t have to be disabled to experience human weakness.  As a pastor for over thirty years I learned that people undergoing a crisis of loss or humiliation could often hear the good news of the Gospel in  fresh new ways, or even for the first time.  In such moments God speaks.  Perhaps only when enough of us is cleared out of the way to silence our own voices can there be the space for us to hear God.

My injury and its deficits also complicate my spiritual life, and that too, has made me aware of faith as a gift that I can’t create in myself.  “Grace,” I once heard James Forbes say, “is where you find love in full bloom in a climate where it is too cold to grow.”  I'm not very good at faith anymore, so it seems even more of a grace when it is there at all.

During my long ministry I was privileged to spend many hours with the aging and dying. They have been my teachers, helping me prepare for my own aging and dying, and also for disability, which shares many of the same features of limitation and loss.  In all these challenges of living one relinquishes features of your previous experience of living.  This is painful, but faith can enable us to exercise “a holy relinquishing,” that is literally “graceful.”  I have been blessed to witness this again and again among those who retain a wonderful dignity in the face of the indignities visited upon the old, the sick and the dying.

Ultimately, grappling with the complications of disability (or just humanity through its life stages) exists within a horizon of hope.  This too, is a gift of faith.  I have stood at hundreds of funerals and proclaimed, “‘I am the resurrection and the life, ’ said the Lord,” and that promise gives me hope.

I don’t know what that new reality will be like, but I cling to bits of Scripture that give us hints and clues. Paul says, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. ”(1 Corinthians 13:12)

The scripture that speaks to me most about disability comes from the vision of John the Divine as reported in the 21st chapter of Revelation.  John looks up and sees a new heaven and a new earth, and a New Jerusalem coming down from God out of heaven.  He says, “God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.”

I take comfort from this promise that God’s ultimate intention for us is a community where we don’t suffer pain or death or loss.  That would have to include disability.  No more sleepless nights, no more depression, no more chronic pain, no more anxiety and fear, no more shame.  No more of all the things that beset us in this earthly life.  Quite a vision!

This horizon of hope often allows me to bounce back from my set-backs, to experience forgiveness for my failings, to face the challenges and complications of each new day, and to enjoy the quotidian little (and sometimes not so little) graces that visit me unbidden and unexpected.

Monday, August 2, 2010

When Theologians Order Apple Pie


Not long ago I had a lovely lunch with my wife and my daughter at The Student Prince, the iconic German restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts. After I had completed my würst plate, the waitress asked me if I would like dessert, and I said, as I patted my stomach, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” She said, “Excuse me?” My daughter, who is a student at Yale Divinity School, shot me a look, and said, “She didn’t get your biblical reference, Dad.” “No thank you,” I quickly added, “I’m full.”

I don’t know why I do this. My family is habituated to my obscure asides. My own family of origin was a biblically literate outfit, and biblical references were sprinkled liberally into our conversation. Perhaps I am nostalgic for a day gone by. I started ruminating about Hans Frei’s The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative; his magisterial account of how we got from a society where people place themselves within the Biblical story to a society where most people don’t even know it. That got me thinking about one of Stanley Hauerwas’ probing questions: “What story do you tell yourself after you have told yourself you have no story?” Or something like that.

That got me thinking about what Stanley might have said to the waitress: “What kind of apple pie do I order after I have told myself there is no apple pie?” And, just like that, a new game was born called “When Theologians Order Apple Pie.”

Please feel free to add your own examples. Here are some of mine.

Waitress, “Would you like dessert?
Reinhold Neibuhr: “The apple pie here isn’t as good as people think it is!”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Karl Barth: “Yes . . . and no.”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Rudoph Bultmann: The widespread belief that it was an apple that tempted Eve is not in the text, which merely says fruit. It could have been a date or a pomegranate. We don’t know, but the mythic form of the pericope suggests it doesn’t matter. Do you have anything with dates?

Waitress: Would you like dessert?”
Marcus Borg: I know that the apple pie here isn’t really apple pie, but I believe it might be satisfying nonetheless.”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Walter Brueggemann: “I will eschew the apple pie, which symbolizes the hegemony of the American Empire, from which the church is, or should be, in exile. Just black coffee.”

Waitress: Would you like dessert?
Mary Daly: I choose to call you, not a waitress or a server, for those are demeaning andro-centric and hierarchical signifiers. You are a “pie BRINGer.”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Paul Tillich: “The apple pie represents our eternal human longing for a pre-lapsarian Eden, despite the obvious fact that apple pie cannot be turned back into apples.

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
Jonathan Edwards: “We can see in a piece of apple pie the deep essence of God’s love, a reflection of the love each of the persons of the Trinity have for one another. But, no, just a glass of water for me, thanks.”

Waitress: “Would you like dessert?”
P.T. Forsyth: “Whenever I eat apple pie, I am reminded that God the holy Father acted decisively in the atoning cross of Jesus Christ to overcome the great breach between God and humans caused by our sin. Do you have any shortbread?

OK, kids, you get the idea.  All you theo-bloggers and bored theological grad students who read too much and don't have anybody that's interested, here's your chance to shine.  I want to see Rahner, Van Balthasar, Aquinas, Anselm and the Cappadocians before the week is out.  Best entries get to buy a piece of apple pie for themselves.