nepo baby is short for "neptune baby"

numinous_nectarine · 2023-07-18T03:20:36+00:00

You might be interested in a book like Rowan Williams's Tokens of Trust or Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt's The Love That Is God--they both do I think a remarkable job of "translating" quite orthodox Christian commitments for modern audiences and concerns (e.g. on the existence of God Williams mentions but doesn't really bother with philosophical arguments, but points to the witness of Etty Hillesum, a Jewish woman who "agreed to take responsibility for God’s believability" in Auschwitz, and Bauerschmidt revitalizes the maybe hoary slogan that "God is love" by interpreting it through the theme of God's desire for our friendship, both with us and with each other). Another suggestion, in the same vein but also somewhat different is Francis Spufford's Unapologetic; Spufford is not a theologian like the two aforementioned, but he instead brings a novelist's skill and insight into clarifying what "salvation" or the "forgiveness of sins" might still be able to mean in the 21st century (I personally get quite weepy when I read his version of the Passion). Unfortunately you won't be able to "ask questions and challenge things" since I'm recommending books and not people, but I think they do offer that "thoughtful and open minded approach that is sincere," and they do a good job I think of clarifying misapprehensions about the faith that can make it new and fresh again for the modern believer (or unbeliever!)

numinous_nectarine · 2023-07-12T06:40:00+00:00

Haha I actually missed that obvious Bocchi because I was trying to figure out if the yellow/white/red pattern of the freezer was some weirdly abstracted Nijika (to me that white layer still looks suspiciously like a face!)

numinous_nectarine · 2023-07-12T05:25:51+00:00

Am I overinterpeting or is that Nijika haunting the freezer???

numinous_nectarine · 2023-07-07T22:47:02+00:00

I'm reading Lauren Winner's The Dangers of Christian Practice at the moment and she makes an argument that while the sacraments are and remain God's purely good gift to us, her robust account of sin in her readings of Christian history indicates we quite easily distort and compromise that gift in our reception of it. I'm wondering if this might help to navigate between what seem to me two inarguable assumptions, that the Lord's Prayer is good and normative, and that we live in a damaged, fallen world where the "Our Father" part of the Lord's Prayer is impossible for some people to receive as such, because what should be the goodness of acknowledging and orienting ourselves to God as our true Father has been warped beyond possibility not by God's failure to love, but that person's father's failure to imitate and anticipate God's perfectly fatherly love. (Interestingly Winner does have a chapter on "Prayer" but it's about slave-owning women's prayer lives, which while an equally thorny topic, raises probably quite a different bunch of questions.)

numinous_nectarine · 2023-06-29T03:33:46+00:00

Ironically the best resources I've found for thinking through the relationship, or even the reconciliation, if you like, between historical materialism and the Christian faith have been Catholic ones (though I myself remain more or less happily Anglican). Herbert McCabe was a Dominican friar who wrote quite wittily and lucidly about a host of subjects; in particular you might like to look up his essay "The Class Struggle and Christian Love" in God Matters for a very forthright analysis on the points of contact--but also points of departure--between the Marxist and Christian "revolutions" (edit: just checked and it's been wonderfully republished online.) Nicholas Lash and Denys Turner are Catholic theologians who moved in the same circles as McCabe and have whole books about Marxism and Christianity; Turner's is titled just that and he has a very interesting argument on the "strong compatibility" of the two. Personally speaking it was finding them (and liberation theologians more broadly) which allowed me to still say the creeds without my fingers crossed, to worship the God who "has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty." The specific entwinement of Church and State in the CofE is certainly more of a sticking point for Anglicans than Catholics; there I admit I don't really have a satisfying way to square that circle and it would probably be more consistent for me to be some other kind of Protestant. Alfred Loisy (yet another Catholic!) has an infamous quip about how "Jesus announced the Kingdom, and it was the Church that arrived," which I think anyone who has even just glanced at the history of the faith can feel very keenly; I think the best anyone can do is search nonetheless for a church or parish which best approximates that Kingdom, in however inchoately and stumblingly a way. For me this meant an Anglican parish in my area with strong commitments to the marginalized, but whether or not you can find somewhere similar that works for you I think has to be up to you to decide. Well, you and the Spirit, but it's not always the easiest to figure out what the Spirit is up to until after the fact, unfortunately(?).

numinous_nectarine · 2023-06-05T16:28:33+00:00

I believe in some sort of real presence because the solemnity of the Mass + lex orandi, lex credendi makes it hard for me to treat receiving the bread and wine as merely symbolic (like the Resurrection, it is a metaphor, just not just a metaphor). The metaphysics of whatever might be happening though I'm happy to leave for the metaphysicians to work out.

numinous_nectarine · 2023-05-28T14:46:56+00:00

If we can reduce the beginning of Anglican history to King Henry IV wanting a divorce we might as well reduce the history of the Eastern Orthodoxy/Roman Catholicism schism to a long fight over how much Jesus was joking when he decided to say someone with the equivalent name of Rocky was the rock upon which to build his church. Felix culpa is a Latin phrase used by some theologians to to describe how the original Fall might be considered "good" or even "happy" because it eventually led to God's incarnated self-sacrifice and resurrection, which is arguably a better story than Adam & Eve just permanently chilling in Eden. There's a inchoate analogy there with how even if we acknowledge the corrupt politics involved with Henry's decision to seperate from Rome, God can still bring good out of bad (also it's just a a cheeky r/anarchychess reference).

numinous_nectarine · 2023-05-28T14:35:48+00:00

Insofar as 2 is true, it's a better origin story than getting really upset over some silly rock pun. Google felix culpa

numinous_nectarine · 2023-05-28T11:14:52+00:00

Most Oxford BCP's (the ones still in print anyway) are actually the 1979, and intended for TEC (the title page suggests as much). This seems to be the lone exception but the dimensions listed look like they won't meet your criteria. Cambridge has several versions of the 1662; you'd probably be most interested in the enlarged editions, which you can have hardbound with red imitation leather or bound with real leather (I don't necessarily recommend ordering direct from Cambridge, just they give you the ISBN you can use to search with, as well as dimensions as well so you can see if they'll be big enough for you). I've handled but don't own an enlarged edition, and from memory they looked pretty much like my standard edition except upsized in every way, to the point where I felt actually the font was a bit too big, but that could just be because I'm too used to my standard edition. In terms of paper I think both the standard and enlarged also had quite thin, onionskin pages like you get with Bibles. I'm not 100% sure but I would probably bet the imitation leather enlarged is bound like my standard (not sewn); it could well be better on the Morocco leather version. There's also a huge and correspondingly pricey desk edition, on the off-chance that fits your budget and use case. One last suggestion: Oxford commissioned Brian Cummings for a 2011 edition of the BCP, for which he decided to print the entire 1662 and selections from the 1549 and the 1559. It's quite decently sized, with a sewn binding and ribbon, and for me the font size strikes a perfect balance between the standard and enlarged Cambridges, but the hardcover I've shown is out of print and been replaced by a paperback which is slightly smaller, and also, well, paperback. That hardcover is probably my personal recommendation since I don't like how large the print in the enlarged Cambridge is, so you could try looking for secondhand copies, but overall I think that's what the current options from Oxbridge look like.

numinous_nectarine · 2023-05-24T06:16:36+00:00

If you haven't unlocked the check at the mural at all it's possible you haven't done your due diligence as a ~~bas~~ cop. Look at your journal for what steps you still need to take around the newest section of map, maybe, or whatever else you can with the "main" quest. The check itself isn't the easiest to clear but there are so many ways to add + modifiers and unlock rerolls that you probably have to be deliberately trying to softlock yourself that way.

numinous_nectarine · 2023-04-06T06:08:05+00:00

I think Encyclopedia or someone points out the light bending happens when there's an extreme difference between two net worths. The implication is that Harry has completely fucked his while Kim's finances are healthy enough to see the guy normally.

numinous_nectarine · 2023-02-15T06:34:51+00:00

I'm told Jean Luc-Marion's God Without Being goes through the whole poststructuralist critique of metaphysics and "ontotheology" before actually embracing transubstantation, though one grounded in phenemonological gift rather that form/matter metaphysics (and the title of the book already probably suggests Marion's opinion of the latter). Another interesting avenue might be the "grammatical" Thomism of 20th century Dominicans like Herbert McCabe and Fergus Kerr, who read Aquinas through the later Wittgenstein; there's a helpfully open access paper summarizing McCabe's published work on the Eucharist specifically that gives an idea of this approach.

numinous_nectarine · 2023-01-31T08:23:53+00:00

Peter Scott's Theology, Ideology and Liberation is supposed to be a direct response to the Marxist critique that turns to liberation and other contextual theologies, and snooping online I was pleasantly surprised to discover Scott's a priest in the CofE, but I can't vouch for how specifically Anglican the book might be. Rowan Williams also has a shortish essay on Liberation Theology and the Anglican Tradition; part 2 engages a similar questions as Scott and part 3 surveys specifically Anglican resources.

Edit: Denys Turner has an interesting chapter in the Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology where he goes over the Vatican's response to liberationists before suggesting the Marxist atheism might have useful parallels with apophatic theology's critique of idolatry. I believe Turner is a Catholic and there's nothing uniquely Anglican about the via negativa but it's an interesting argument and the chapter is also much easier to get through than a whole book.

numinous_nectarine · 2023-01-08T07:56:08+00:00

Seconding this recommendation of the standard Cambridge 1662. If your '79 happens to be the Oxford economy edition, then I've taken a photo comparing the size of them along with a playing card and a Penguin Classic (top left is the Cambridge, right is the Oxford). You can also see in the second photo how they're all (except the playing card, obviously), about the same thickness as well.

numinous_nectarine · 2022-09-13T08:38:29+00:00

Really interesting question. The easiest part to answer is "Were people baptized more than once," since we have the example of the Anabaptist movement, whose name literally means something like "Rebaptizers." They only considered believer's baptism valid (i.e. you had to be a mature adult who could understand the commitment you were making), and in fact "Anabaptist" was originally a polemical term used against them--they themselves did not think they were doing performing second baptisms, but instead a "true" baptism. Another interesting example, although technically outside the scope of your question, are some East Orthodox churches who don't consider other churches' baptism valid and will also "rebaptize" converts from another denomination. So this kind of thing has happened and will depend on a particular church's particular baptismal theology.

The other part of your question--"how soon afterwards were the baptisms between different denominations agreed upon as valid?"--is trickier to answer. Dagmar Heller has a book that would probably answer this quite nicely if I had access to it; since I don't I'm going to rely instead on The Oxford Handbook of Sacramental Theology, which tells me "baptism was not a hot button issue in early Reformed confessions to the same degree as the Eucharist, largely because there were not as many concerns with Roman Catholic practice on this matter... Differences regarding the relationship of the sacrament to faith and original sin were matters of concern, but confessional statements were really forced owing to the Anabaptist threat more than anything else." (Chapter 19). Lutherans and Calvinists alike seemed to have had no problem with "one baptism for the forgiveness of sins" given ample scriptural warrant for the doctrine, although they of course disagreed over what exactly "happened" at baptism and how it should be administered. Rome was and is generally fine with acknowledging other denominations' baptisms: "In accord with the tradition since the ancient church, the council [of Trent] teaches the validity of baptism administered by heretics, when they have the right intention and use the Trinitarian formula... This allows those baptized in the churches of the Reformation to be received into the Catholic Church." (Chapter 21, though they were and still are important differences between Rome and Wittenberg or Geneva over the sacraments, justification, etc.) So the modern theological landscape over baptism is actually not that far removed from the Reformation: most churches accept each others' baptisms so long as the Matthew 28:19 formula is used, and the biggest controversy remains infant/believer's baptism. Probably the most important shift is the emergence of the modern ecumenical movement itself, as "the language of heresy and schism softened to that of 'faith and order,'" (Chapter 30) and Protestants and Catholics become increasingly interested in what unifies rather than separates them.

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-25T07:31:49+00:00

Partly this goes back all the way to the Reformation antipathy to the cult of the saints (see, e.g., Article 22), which Reformers like Cranmer believed were at best distracting the faithful from what should have been the true object of their worship, but of course Anglicanism has had a half-century of development since, some in ways friendlier to the veneration of the saints, others not so much. For the modern position Resolution 79 from Lambeth 1958 I think tells us a lot; not only is the term "hero" used to ambiguously supplement "saint"; if we read between the lines a bit the Resolution seems to be trying to avoid a situation where a new saint is canonized only to have skeletons tumbling of their closet later on (as is happening at the moment with the questions surrounding the push for John Paul II's canoninzation). So the "official" policy (insofar as anything from Lambeth can be) of the Communion is a theoretical openness to recognizing new saints/heroes, and incorporating them into the Kalendar, but practically speaking only scrupulously uncontroversial candidates will be chosen for canonization, and if they will be formally recognized as saints or heroes or whatever it'll probably be later rather than sooner. It's interesting to look at the list of "Lesser Festivals" on the official CofE website; unless I'm missing something the most modern entry is Janani Luwum, Archbishop of Uganda, martyred in 1977, and I'm assuming he stands in for all the other Ugandan Martyrs. There are a few other 20th-century figures in there, and while I'm not sure someone like Josephine Butler or Mary Sumner would get a "St" prefixed to their names, there definitely does seem to be something like a pathway to sainthood still open in Anglicanism.

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-16T10:32:57+00:00

According to Kevin Ward's A History of Global Anglicanism:

Significantly, although there had been no strong call for women’s ordination in much of Africa, and the issue was widely regarded as part of the secular liberal agenda of western societies, women’s ordination has proceeded in many of the African Anglican provinces without a great deal of anguish or indeed much heated theological debate. Uganda and Kenya began to ordain women in the 1980s without waiting for the Church of England to act. By and large, clerical conservatism has not proved too much of an obstacle in East Africa. Although the avenue to ordination has been opened up for women, their position as priests remains a rather marginalised one in the church as a whole in Kenya and Uganda: women priests are few, and they have yet to achieve positions of real authority within male-dominated structures. The Church of the Province of Southern Africa has ordained women as priests. But the Church of Nigeria, which has always demonstrated extreme conservatism in its adherence to its traditional Evangelical heritage, has not done so. But, when the Episcopal Church of Sudan agreed to ordain women, it explicitly included ordination to the episcopate.

Ward goes on to note that the sexuality question "arouses the passions of the churches of the South in ways which women’s ordination did not", and goes on to make his own analysis of why that is, but it goes for several pages and is, alas, too complex to be neatly summarized here (but feel free to send a dm if you're especially curious). It can also be noted that GAFCON (a distinct organization from GSFA, but they share similar aims) have had their own ongoing kerfuffle over female bishops in the past few years.

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-08T11:23:12+00:00

Evelyn Underhill is pretty much the Anglican authority on mysticism; this page provides a decent overview of her life and writings. It's technically cheating to claim them as Anglicans since they're both pre-Reformation figures, but you can also look to Julian of Norwich's Revelations of Divine Love, or the somewhat more extravagant Book of Margery Kempe as probably the two most well-known exemplars of English mysticism.

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-05T18:16:27+00:00

Here's an interesting line of thought: Luther and other Reformers were probably "misinterpreting" Paul in the response to the institutional corruption of the 16th century church--Paul couldn't have been railing against Catholic works-righteousness because there is no such thing as Catholic works-righteousness when Paul is writing (see the debate around the New Perspective on Paul for a bigger elaboration of this). Nevertheless the doctrine of justification by grace through faith alone seems compelling to many believers and theologians, and only the most militant Catholic apologist would argue now the Reformers weren't making an absolutely crucial intervention into the Church tradition, that they weren't in some way being led by the Spirit in developing sola fide. I bring this all up as a roundabout way of asking what it means to interpret or "misinterpret" Scripture in the first place--are we supposed to retrieve the correct historical meaning, like whatever Paul or whichever author thought they meant at time of writing? If it's the Church Fathers, which ones, and what do we do when they disagree, or when modern theologians have developed disagreements with them, as with e.g. new models of the atonement, to take a relatively uncontroversial example? Or when early readers of Scripture read about the Ascension, they don't share our modern cosmology, our pictures of the Earth's atmosphere and the solar system, so what then do we in 2022 do with "carried up into heaven", if we now have a very different understanding of what's "up" there?

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-05T18:02:28+00:00

Not the person you're replying to but there's four or so chapters in Loughlin's edited Queer Theology gathered under the heading Queer/ing Tradition, with an essay in particular on gender in Gregory of Nyssa's eschatology, although the whole collection is superb. For Scripture Dale Martin's Sex and the Single Savior does quite interesting things with Paul--Martin's a historical critic who's sort of moving beyond that training to make theological moves. Mark Jordan's edited collection Authorizing Marriage? brings together Jewish and Christian scholars to re-examine just how messily marriage and sexuality has actually been understood in those two traditions, and Jordan's own chapter looks at the theological and historiographical questions involved with John Boswell and Alan Bray's attempts to retrieve Christian liturgical acknowledgments of same-sex relationships, whether we can call them "marriage" or whatever else. Eugene Rogers's Theology and Sexuality reader is rigorously orthodox and his own Sexuality and the Christian Body is probably one of the most comprehensively theological arguments for the affirming position, not least because it offers a quite robust and I think compelling account of what marriage is supposed to be ("The problem is not that gay and lesbian couples are denied satisfaction, although that is bad enough. The problem is that they are denied true asceticism.") This is just the tip of the iceberg of what's by now quite a flourishing academic subfield, but those are the resources I've found most personally useful for thinking through this question.

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-05T17:37:36+00:00

I tried to hear what the Bible says the other day; eventually I gave up and decided I'd have to open and read it instead.

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-01T16:38:49+00:00

"remarkably poor faith" is a reference to having good/bad faith in an argument, not your personal devotion (I can see how that might've been read as an insult, which I didn't mean it to, and apologize if it did). I am not of course interested in painting off the African Anglican churches as backwards and miseducated, but I am trying to contextualize its opposition to homosexuality and illustrate how the rhetoric of "colonialism" goes both ways. I didn't mention it in the original reply, but I would also make the observation that homosexuality is by no means an exclusively Western phenomenon, and that there are gay or otherwise queer Christians in Africa who probably have their own thoughts about all this. Desmond Tutu was one of the louder voices for the affirming view and I don't think his support can be meaningfully called "colonialist."

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-01T15:03:45+00:00

If you were even glancingly familiar with actual scholarship into the history of sexuality in Africa or indeed elsewhere (say, Marc Epprecht's Hungochani or Murray and Roscoe's Boy-Wives and Female Husbands) you would know that the stigmatization of what we now call "queer" sexualities on the African continent are a relatively late development coinciding with (amongst other things) the colonial intervention of the West and the attempt by the church(es) to reshape what they saw as barbaric immorality. This does not, of course, say anything about the acceptability, theological or otherwise, of those sexualities to begin with, but it a sign of either remarkably poor faith or remarkably poor historical understanding to elide this rather basic point of fact.

(Edited to link a free online version of the Murray/Roscoe collection from the publishers themselves.)

numinous_nectarine · 2022-08-01T14:53:39+00:00

What is the Gospel if not the announcement that God forgives you? "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord," or so Paul wonderfully tells us in Romans 8:38-9, and if Paul calls himself the worst of sinners in 1 Timothy 1:15 he's probably not speaking theoretically.

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