Barbarians at the Gates

Over at The Journey Home Paul has some interesting comments about the barbarians in our midst. He concludes:

What, I wonder might be the shape of the struggle to come, for us, between civility and barbarism, and what its monument of record, whichever the outcome?

In Truth to Tell: The Gospel as Public Truth, Leslie Newbiggin said that we must proclaim the gospel in public conversations in every discipline because in so doing we will be offering hope into a future that will not belong so much to the secularist or pluralists but to the barbarians. According to Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, the barbarians are already among us, creating a society which might more accurately be described as hedonistically consumerist rather than secular but is clearly not at ease with itself and is searching for something more. The reduction of the options to the secular alone - whether in law or elsewhere in our public sphere - will not fully satisfy or please.

Read the rest here.

Preaching on Hope

I'm preaching on hope this morning so I went back and reread one of my favourite pieces on preaching on hope. Frederick Buechner wrote this:

If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for....

And let them talk with equal honesty about their own reasons for hoping -- not just the official, doctrinal, Biblical reasons but the reasons rooted deep in their own day by day experience. They have hope that God exists because from time to time over the years they believe they have been touched by God. Let them speak of those times with the candor and concreteness and passion without which all the homiletical eloquence and technique in the world are worth little.

Amen

Read the whole piece here.