Aphorism of the Day, April 30, 2023
A shepherd was a symbol of leadership in ancient Israel since leaders had more resources to "manipulate" the more dependent masses. If leaders today have more money and resources to "manipulate" the masses who are deprived of the same, good shepherd leadership does not exploit those who are weaker, less informed, and poorer.
Aphorism of the Day, April 29, 2023
Taking advantage of one's strengths and assets to exploit for personal gain is the exact counter to what being a good shepherd means.
Aphorism of the Day, April 28, 2023
If Jesus spoke in "figures of speech," then the Gospel writers want the readers to appreciate the differences in discursive practices, meaning the words are not an exact mirror reflection of the realities to which words are referring. Understanding meaningful signification of a text is always an issue.
Aphorism of the Day, April 27, 2023
The message of the metaphor of the Good Shepherd is to be a shepherd for the vulnerable. If one is given ownership, power, wealth, and knowledge then those should be used to care for those who need it.
Aphorism of the Day, April 26, 2023
Every metaphor has its signifying limitation and may deconstruct when expansive literalness is applied. For example, the Lord is my shepherd, or Jesus as the Good Shepherd. What is a shepherd's relationship to his sheep? He owns the sheep and feeds and cares for the sheep in order to get food, wool, and milk products. The ownership of sheep is essentially exploitive, with a sheep being a commodified animal. Our view of God or Jesus would not want to tap the exploitive aspect of what shepherding means, so we limit the metaphor to God and Jesus caring for us like a favorite pet.
Aphorism of the Day, April 25, 2023
Writings are made in specific times and places in language that is best known and interpreted within the specific times and places. What happens when language contexts are no longer accessible to later readers of ancient words? Can anyone claim to understand the meanings of ancient text as though meanings were "self-evidential" over time?
Aphorism of the Day, April 24, 2023
The presentation of Jesus as the good shepherd is chiefly supported by the confessing words, "I lay down my life for the sheep." Is any farm commodity worth the life of a worker, if threatened? As a figure of speech, it refers to human leadership sacrificing life for followers. This is counter to the norm of the people sacrificing their lives for the leader. What CEO says, "I will give up my privileges and bonuses for the employees?"
Aphorism of the Day, April 23, 2023
Resurrection is a poetry of the future.
Aphorism of the Day, April 22, 2023
Faith is hoping the assessments of the future will make sense of the bafflements of the present.
Aphorism of the Day, April 21, 2023
Present disappoint might be expressed in the phrase, "we had hoped that..." Outcomes often reveal that we have had the wrong vision of what we hoped for or the wrong timing for when they might happen, or the wrong notions about how they might happen. We live by the insight, "The future will give clarity to the past and to what is happening now."
Aphorism of the Day, April 20, 2023
Serendipity is when something "random" gets experienced as favorable and blessed timing of something good happening to us. Serendipity and surprise go together because one can't plan one's own serendipity. What is often called a theophany is serendipitous. If we can't plan theophanies, what does that tell us about the apparentness of God to each human being? Most of life involves having faith while living with the general apparentness of God without all the thunderbolts and light shows.
Aphorism of the Day, April 19, 2023
Like a light switch the Risen Christ could turn on or turn off his appearance. He turned on his appearance suddenly in the breaking of the bread with the Emmaus road walkers. Could this be a metaphorical story about Eucharistic presence? The Gospel invites us to read with "inner eyes," poetic eyes.
Aphorism of the Day, April 18, 2023
The resurrection is the explanation for the many reappearances of Christ after the death of Jesus. Jesus became a rhetorical and poetic expansive feeling phrase of "Christ as all and in all." Such a phrase is meant to proclaim divine personal omnipresence or divine immanence.
Aphorism of the Day, April 17, 2023
The Bible as any text is "re-written" every time it is read because it becomes variation of meaning according to the version of the reader who have unique linguistic programming.
Aphorism of the Day, April 16, 2023
Doubting is a good exercise to help us continual pan interpretative framework to find what is appropriate for the textual situation.
Aphorism of the Day, April 15, 2023
The mysteries expressed by religious discourse thwart science proving that religion and science employ different discourses with different truth purposes. The problem happens when religionists assert that the events of their poetry could have been empirically verified. The scientists rightly say, "Stick to your mysticism."
Aphorism of the Day, April 14, 2023
The so called "Doubting Thomas" story is really a wisdom parable to shed light on the blessedness, the validity, equality, and the affirmation of a wide variety of experiences of the Risen Christ.
Aphorism of the Day, April 13, 2023
Empirical verification or sensorial experience is the standard for to indicating something is really real. And stories about such in the Gospels are a way of establishing the really "realness" of inward experience. Just as Thomas saw and touched, so too those who did not see and touch had a really real encounter with the Risen Christ. One's inward life is as true as one's outward life but in substantially different ways. People of faith can be honest scientists.
Aphorism of the Day, April 12, 2023
One of the subtle results of institutional religion is to assume that the presences of Christ can be limited to the administrative prerogatives of the leadership.
Aphorism of the Day, April 11, 2023
In the "doubting Thomas" story, the writer of John's Gospel is claiming that modes of knowing the Risen Christ are blessed and equal in faith and truth status to eyewitness encounters with Jesus. The post-death of Jesus encounters with the Risen Christ in various modes are the new norms.
Aphorism of the Day, April 10, 2023
What role did grief play in bringing the apparitional appearances of Christ to his disciples? Can extraordinary grief command extraordinary appearances?
Aphorism of the Day, April 9, 2023
On Easter we ponder personal continuity beyond death. Does the "software" of our inside stuff of self consciousness continue to function without the "hardware" of our bodies?
Aphorism of the Day, April 8, 2023
The Sabbath rest of Jesus in Holy Week is the time that his body resided in the tomb and there is speculation about where the spirit of Jesus went when "separated" from his body. The bringing to language of what really is unknowable and mysterious is the creative use of words to produce hope and the undeniability of the future.
Aphorism of the Day, April 7, 2023
God's greatest attribute may be also how divine weakness manifests itself locally. God is omnipresent Freedom and Great Freedom shares lesser freedom everywhere and does not interfere with it locally. Why? True moral worth happens because of when occasions are not coerced. Great freedom is weak when shared with local freedom as in an individual not wanting to choose to manifest the lure of love which rides upon Great Freedom.
Aphorism of the Day, April 6, 2023
Rituals can lose their anthropological soundness when they become religious acts to simply follow rules. The Maundy Thursday ritual highlights two crucial aspect for the survival of community: Eating and service. We should not isolate Jesus as living bread from actual bread which gives people physical survival and eating together is a way of guaranteeing that each has enough to eat.
Aphorism of the Day, April 5, 2023
Holy Week and Easter are the communal ways to deal with the reality of death and after-death. Death is the brute reality of life. Post-death resurrection is a discourse of hope for the unknown not yet. Death is the failure to preserve the quality of life as we have known it. We project an afterlife Preserver of the continuity of personal identity, not because we egotistically think that any of us deserves everlasting existence, but because any becoming is an absolute becoming in having happened, and having been absolute in having happened, such absoluteness can never be erased. People can never be said to not having happened.
Aphorism of the Day, April 4, 2023
In Holy Week we grapple with what Continuity means. We get mixed signals; we're supposed to love life but not to the point of not being able to adjust when life is lost. Continuity remains in life and death but we don't have the contemporaneous witness of the dead to have their views of the role of being dead within Continuity. Death experienced as not have familiar access to someone has given birth the creative imaginations of the afterlife. At death a person leaves the discourse of science and empirical verification regarding their "not in their body" becoming; about the afterlife one can only use artistic discourses of creative imagination. When we speak about the afterlife, it is always translated into "this life" language and experience.
Aphorism of the Day, April 3, 2023
Holy Week is the strategy of calendar time in the annual Christian curriculum used to build community identity with Christ through the corporate remembering of the root events of the Jesus Movement.
Aphorism of the Day, April 2, 2023
The liturgical juxtaposition of the Palm Procession and the Passion Gospel highlights the crowds that one might belong to when viewing Jesus. A Jerusalem crowd might be threatened by Jesus because the Romans building projects where providing employment in the city. The outsiders from Galilee could come to town and put their hero on a donkey in a parade and threaten the tenuous relationship between the city's religious leaders and the Roman occupiers.
Aphorism of the Day, April 1, 2023
St. Paul wrote about "glorying in the cross of Christ," and one can wonder if this is like trying to put lipstick on an ugly pig. How could death become a necessary absence of Jesus in order for endless number of people to have experiences of the presences of the Risen Christ? A "functional" resurrection seems to have happened only for Jesus and his followers; for us we don't have immediate post-resurrection experiences with our faithful departed loved ones, not unless we have our imaginations on apparitional overload. In Christian lore, the death of Jesus is one-of-a-kind and the deaths of our loved ones are also unique but don't seem to have the same redemptive meanings as we inconsolably miss them even with gratitude for them having been in our lives.
