All posts filed under: Religion

Church Attendence in American is reverting to the norm, not declining

January 21, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Religion

The Canon to the Ordinary here Rhode Island, the Rev. Canon Dr. Dena Cleaver-Bartholemew pointed me to this post on Threads: @marlena.graves • Threads: From my dissertation, “Kevin Kruse judiciously points out that in 1850 church attendance was a mere 16 percent and that in 1900 church attendance was at 36 percent. It was only at the end of the 1950s that church attendance skyrocketed to 69 percent after corporate interests had been pushing an […]

Thurman’s insights that informed the Civil Rights Era

January 17, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Religion

Howard Thurman, sometimes described as America’s leading 20th century Theologian and Philosopher wrote Jesus and the Disinherited (1949) that had an immense influence on the thinking of the architects of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. To my mind it’s the reason that the movement had the success it had – it was firmly grounded in the realistic understanding of human nature that is part of the New Testament’s world-view. I came […]

Back and forth

January 13, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Religion

I came across this quote a while ago and I’ve been thinking about it lately. It’s from MacCulloch’s magisterial history of Christianity. First, it’s not a claim I’ve heard before. I have heard that parables do appear in early rabbinic literature, but this says that parables appeared in the Gospels as a literary form before they started to show up in other writings. Do any of you happen to know if that’s true? If it […]

Speak of coming failure, not success?

January 11, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Religion

The failure of Anglican managerialism | Gerry Lynch | The Critic Magazine: High Modernism in its post-War heyday was marked by strong confidence in scientific, technological, and moral progress; deference to expertise and technique — or the verisimilitude of them; faith that humanity could master nature — including human nature; and a disregard for local variation, and inherited organically-developed concepts and structures. […]But we don’t live in 1963 anymore. The decline of faith in modernism […]

What is the presenting problem in the Gospel?

January 10, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Religion

It is hard to separate art from the context in which it is created. It’s hard to understand great insights and leaps of imagination if you can’t inhabit the world-view of the thinker who is making them. And that’s true for the books of the Bible as well. I believe the lessons that Jesus teaches are timeless, but they are timeless, in large part, because they explain and illuminate things that are common to all […]

Why declare cows sacred?

January 7, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Reconciliation / Religion / Science

Cattle in The Earliest European Cities Weren’t Bred as Food : ScienceAlert: Between 4200 and 3650 BCE, animals domesticated by Trypillia societies were prized largely for their poop, not their flesh, according to Schlütz and his team. An analysis of nitrogen isotopes in teeth, bones, and soil from the remains of Tryphillia societies suggests that early farmers in Europe were mostly consuming peas, lentils, and cereal grains, like barley. Cattle, sheep, and goats, which were […]

The Overview Effect by Tessa Kale

January 4, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Blogging / Religion / Science

I was delighted to receive this original poem written by Tessa Kale in an email this afternoon as a response to the posts and sermons about our human place in the Universe and our relationship to it and each other:   The Overview Effect Their brightness was measured:they must be rational, logicalnot subject to raptures certainly not visions. They must beBlake’s naked Newton,a fierce focus on calipers and their calculus.  But the astronauts did look […]

The tragedy of the commons is a false and dangerous myth | Aeon Essays

August 13, 2023
by Nicholas Knisely
Climate Change / Current Affairs / Religion

I’ve certainly read people who quoted from Garrett Hardin’s 1968 paper in Science “The Tragedy of the Commons” often enough. It’s a cautionary tale about how, if humans are left unchecked, our selfishness will destroy the environment and the resources that are our common wealth. But it appears that this paper has some major flaws that I’ve not seen laid out before. There are deep lines of eugenic thoughts going through it and his subsequent […]

The Human in AI – Comment Magazine

August 10, 2023
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs / Religion / Web/Tech

Having co-written a piece with Kirk Smith on some practical ways that AI might be useful in small church ministry; I feel like I should point people to this longer, much more thoughtful article by Prof. Walter J. Scheirer on how AI might impact what it is to be a human being in the years to come: The Human in AI – Comment Magazine: The Portuguese political scientist Bruno Maçães has argued in his recent […]

St. Hildegard of Bingen, Patron of Creation Care?

March 20, 2023
by Nicholas Knisely
Religion / Science / SOSc

There’s a lovely article about Hildegard of Bingen by Erin Risch Zountendam posted this morning on the blog “Earth and Altar.” Hildegard, one of the four female doctors of the Western Church, was a theologian, a prophet, a mystic and a naturalist. Her life and her theology is, to my mind, one of the clearest examples of my argument that most scientists are, in truth, mystics at heart – seeking to understand a deeper meaning […]