Several years ago I was shocked when Dr. Jimmy Cobb of the Canadian Baptist Seminary in Cochrane, Alberta, Canada told me the fastest growing religious segment of the population in Canada was those who claimed “no religion.” It looks as if that northern sentiment has filtered south. A July 19, 2012 online article in USA Today notes that 19% of Americans chose “None” as their religion, the highest that answer has ever been. Writes Cathy Lynn Grossman: People who check “None” for their religious affiliation are now nearly one in five Americans (19%), the highest ever documented, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press. The rapid rise of Nones — including atheists, agnostics and those who say they believe “nothing in particular” — defies the usually glacial rate of change in spiritual identity. The tabulation included surveys of 19,377 people conducted by the Pew Research Center throughout 2011.
Gluttony: The worship of food? Part 2
In Part 1 of this series we considered gluttony as a sin. Click here to read that post. Among other things we saw: The Bible speaks indirectly to gluttony each time it speaks of self-control (self-discipline). Self-control, where food is concerned, is exhibited by not gluttonizing our meals. The Bible, incidentally, teaches us that self-control is a fruit of the Spirit. When the Holy Spirit is controlling our lives self-control is an evidence of it. On a practical level this reveals a dramatic number of times we seem to sit at the table, quench the Spirit, and immediately lose control of our appetite. One Hebrew word translated gluttons in the Old Testament is zalal which means “a riotous eater,” but can also figuratively mean “to have loose morals.” Would it be too far a stretch to call gluttony “the pornification of food”? At the end of the post I promised a look at a biblical understanding of gluttony and some tools to help. Perhaps it would have helped to have reworded “a biblical understanding” of gluttony to “a biblical awareness of how to respond to gluttony.” Having already understood that gluttony is a sin, how should we respond to it? If we are given to gluttony what should we do?
‘The Dark Knight Rises,’ movie review
The long awaited, highly anticipated final chapter of Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy comes to an end with The Dark Knight Rises, which opened this morning at theaters across the country. It has already been hailed as a “masterpiece” by Andrew O’Hehir at Salon and “mercilessly brilliant” by Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times film critic. Set eight years after The Dark Knight Batman is no longer a hero. Taking the fall for the death of District Attorney gone mad, Harvey Dent, Batman is in exile, just as the final scenes of the second installment prefigured. Passage of the Dent Act in Gotham City has jailed a thousand gangsters and reduced crime to parking tickets. Or a missing senator to be precise. Enter Bane the mercenary terrorist. Tom Hardy plays the respirator masked villain, the “pure evil” who becomes Gotham’s undoing. As the city is held hostage until her certain destruction, The Dark Knight Rises incorporates elements of both Batman Begins with its philosophical underpinnings and The Dark Knight with the character portrayal of malevolent, seemingly unstoppable evil. (I see this segment as having more direct biblical overtones than the first two. The heel of the savior is bruised, he spends time in the grave (“hell” if you prefer), and comes back to crush the head of the enemy.)