“The Weekend Wanderer” is a weekly curated selection of news, stories, resources, and media on the intersection of faith and culture for you to explore through your weekend. Wander through these links however you like and in any order you like. Disclaimer: I do not necessarily agree with all the views expressed within these articles but have found them thought-provoking.
“Understanding Nicaea 1700 Years Later: An Annotated Guide” – Justin Hawkins at Mere Orthodoxy: “This month marks the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea. From May to August 325 AD, Christian bishops were convened by the yet-unbaptized emperor Constantine to settle the controversy between Arius and Alexander of Alexandria. They attempted to do so in the creed and anathemas that they propounded…The 1700th anniversary of the council and its creed is an opportune moment for current and future church and ministry leaders to re-visit the council again, both to teach through a creed that is (or ought to be) confessed weekly in their churches, and to familiarize oneself anew with the philosophical and theological concepts upon which the debate was decided.”
“A Syrian Village Fights To Save Aramaic, the Language of Jesus” – Cian Ward and Aubin Eymard in New Lines Magazine: “At a small bus station in northern Damascus, a handful of old men load a worn-out bus with food supplies and large wooden planks. Once the required quota of passengers is met, the driver starts the engine, which rumbles out clouds of smoke. After three-quarters of an hour of the vehicle strenuously puffing its way up the Qalamoun mountains, it stops at Basateen Square, located in the heart of Maaloula. Nestled amid towering cliffs 4,500 feet above sea level, the village is one of the last Christian strongholds in Syria. It is also one of the last places in the world where Aramaic, the language spoken by Jesus Christ, is still spoken — sort of. ‘In reality, the locals speak Western Neo-Aramaic. It’s hard to think there is a continuity with the language Jesus spoke, as it is a dialect that developed after his time, emerging during the Kingdom of Osroene,’ explains Dominique Gonnet, a founding member of the Paris-based Syriac Studies Society and a researcher specializing in Hebrew and Aramaic. Osroene was a Mesopotamian kingdom that lasted into the third century. While the language is not exactly the same as that spoken by Jesus, ‘it is clearly the closest thing to it in our modern world,’ confirms Gonnet. In Maaloula, as well as in two neighboring villages, Jabadeen and Bakha, Aramaic is spoken daily by a portion of the population.”
“Kay Arthur, beloved Bible teacher, author and co-founder of Precept ministry, has died” – Bob Smietana in Religion News Service: “Kay Arthur, a popular Christian speaker, author and longtime host of the ‘Precepts for Life’ Bible teaching program that was broadcast around the world, has died. She was 91. ‘She will be remembered for her love for the Lord, His Word, and His people,’ Chattanooga-based Precept, the ministry Arthur co-founded with her late husband, Jack, said in announcing her death. ‘A dynamic speaker with a warm writing style that captivated many, Kay was a remarkable beacon of grace and truth to all who encountered her.’ A former missionary and registered nurse, Arthur was born Nov. 11, 1933, in Jackson, Michigan, and graduated from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Her first marriage was short and ended in divorce after the couple had two sons, leaving Arthur in what her ministry called ‘a period of great personal hardship.’ Arthur would later look back on that time and recall that it helped prepare her for ministering, saying that ‘all suffering has an end.'”
“Confessions of a Striver” – Bonnie Kristian in Christianity Today: “‘There’s a big difference between middle class and striver class,’ the conservative commentator Aaron Renn wrote last year. ‘Middle class is about building a life,’ he said, about ‘the material elements of the American Dream.’ To be a striver, by contrast, is about ‘moving up in the world,’ not so much financially—though that can be a component—but in terms of social recognition, especially among well-educated peers. The ambition of the middle class is to have a nice house and take fun vacations, Renn said. The ambition of the striver looks like ]wanting to become a tenured professor at a good university, or to own an apartment in a fashionable NYC neighborhood, or to get an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.’…As a striver, I want to agree. Tell me that I’m just fine. But Renn’s assertion of the moral neutrality of striving is far from universal in the Christian tradition. Theologians from Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica to Miroslav Volf in his newly released book The Cost of Ambition: How Striving to Be Better Than Others Makes Us Worse have argued that much of what we call striving or ambition is a sin.”
“Churches of Restoration in Milwaukee: Currents of Kenosis” – Noah Guthrie at the A Rocha blog: “Our Churches of Restoration program helps participating churches integrate care for God’s creation into their congregational lives. During our pilot year, we are working with over 20 churches from a diverse range of denominations, regions, and cultural backgrounds. Each church brings their own unique story and circumstances, and each pursues carefully chosen actions, large or small, to take a step forward to care for God’s creatures and landscapes. This is the story of one participating congregation in Wisconsin, Eastbrook Church. Many thanks to John Osborne for telling me the story of his river cleanup work, to Katherine Riebe and the rest of Eastbrook’s creation care team for answering lots of questions, and to Eastbrook as a whole for declaring the Gospel to all creation.”
“Talking With Alan Jacobs About John Milton” – Phil Christman at his blog, The Tourist: “I’m trying to get back into the habit of running interviews with authors I like. Since Alan Jacobs’s excellent Paradise Lost: A Biography is only days away from publication — June 3 is the official date — I figured that there was no better time for me to take my quibbles with Milton’s epic to a guy fully qualified to answer them. He answered them so well that I started to feel bad for eating up so much of his time. Like, these answers could be book chapters in their own right. I have indeed come to feel closer to the poem over my decades of teaching it, but it’s been a long strange trip.
When I first read Paradise Lost, and in the early years of my teaching it, I thought it powerful but cold, a demonstration in verse of certain theological propositions. And for a long time that’s kinda how I taught it — an approach perhaps encouraged by the place where I taught it, which was Wheaton College, a Christian liberal-arts school. Wheaton students come to class, or in those years they did, with a fairly sizable body of biblical knowledge and a lot of theological questions and concerns. So my highly intellectual/conceptual/thematic way of reading the poem suited my academic environment. I taught the poem fairly successfully, I thought, within those limits anyway, and for a long time did not seriously question my approach. Only quite gradually did something dawn on me that now seems utterly obvious: that whatever else Paradise Lost is, it’s a work of the Baroque. It’s elaborate, complex, decorated — gorgeous, really,”
Music: : Jon Guerra, “Take Up Your Cross,” from Jesus
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Matthew Erickson 