Pacifism

A good friend attends a Friends Church, a church known for its emphasis on reconciliation and refusal to use the tools of violence to settle human differences.  I stand in the mainstream of the Christian tradition and accept Augustine’s just war theory. At this level I am not a pacifist. But I can’t help but wonder how just war theory bleeds over into church life.

Feeling the Bible

I just finished reading through the Book of Jeremiah. This time I used The Message version, Eugene Peterson’s English rendering of the Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. Peterson’s translation work takes into account not only the denotation of the words but their connotations. He wants us to not only understand the text but by careful word selection and sentence construction feel the text. Sometimes a straight word-for-word translation just can’t pull this off.