I’ve resumed posting chapters of After, my post-apocalyptic thriller serial. I’d left off a while ago with Chapter 18, even though the last one I promoted was 17. At any rate, head over to the main page and pick up where you left off. I’ll be posting chapters on Friday with the hashtag #FreeFictionFriday if you want to follow along on Twitter or Mastodon.
I’ve got a very belated WWBC blog post up. I completely missed the May 29th post even though I had an event set on my calendar and everything. You can find my first pass at “Museums or Galleries I’ve Visited or Want to Visit” here. I knew I’d have a lot to say about the topic, and I was right. I got 1200 words into it and realized I’d have to make a second post. I’ll get that second post up Sometime Soon™.
Pool season opened this weekend. Just like we do each year we set up one of the above-ground pools, we started talking about an inground pool. They’re expensive, sure, but how much is our time worth every year when we put up and take down a collapsible pool? We’ve bought three in the 8 or so years we’ve been at Wayfarer’s Refuge. And while that amount pales in comparison to the cost of a “real” pool, I think we’d be further ahead in the long run to buy an inground pool. But they’re very expensive, so we have to give it some serious thought before we pull the trigger. We’ll see.
Revisiting Older Posts
Almost every day, I check the visitor stats here. I’m always curious about which posts are getting traffic and so forth. This past week, for some reason an old post about Ariel Castro got a couple of hits. Castro kidnapped three girls in Cleveland, OH, back in the first part of the century, holding them for 11 years. One of them escaped one day and raised the alarm. Castro was eventually convicted of 937 counts of various crimes and sentenced to life plus 1,000 years. He died by suicide in 2013, a month into his sentence.
In that post, I wrote
I believe in a redemptive, restoring, healing God.
And I went on for a bit about how God loves us and so forth.
But that’s completely at odds with what I believe these days. I haven’t quit believing in God—the “God of the Bible” may or may not exist. I’m agnostic about that. But I don’t think he’s the loving, benevolent God Christians like to claim he is. The Bible certainly doesn’t portray him that way.
I’d guess though that a fair number of posts I wrote before about 2015 have a drastically different take on faith than what I’ve written over the last few years.
What should I do about those posts?
I’m not the same person. I don’t believe the same things.
Should I delete those posts?
I considered it for a while. I still do on occasion. But I don’t think I will.
Yes, I’ve changed. I don’t believe what I did back then.
But that’s okay.
Leaving those older posts up just shows how much I’ve changed. And if they bring some measure of comfort to people, that’s fine, too.
Speaking of Faith
Why is it that, almost 25 years into the 21st century, churches are still arguing about women as clergy?
From The Roys Report, I see that the Southern Baptist Conference is no longer content to just disfellowship churches for having women as senior pastors. At this year’s annual meeting, they’re going to be voting to amend their constitution to completely ban women from any kind of pastor or elder position. The conference passed the amendment last year, but procedural regs require a second vote of two-thirds of the “messengers” to pass it into church law.
Passing the “Law Amendment” could mean disfellowshipping any SBC church that has women in any pastoral position, such as Children’s Pastor, or Pastor for Women and Children. It gladdens my heart to see that a number of churches have already pulled the plug on their own, leaving the SBC for more moderate Baptist organizations.
In a similar vein, the Anglican Church in North America is facing a call to ban the ordination of women. An open letter to the ACNA’s College of Bishops, signed by some 297 clergy, calls on the College to “restore orthodoxy” by instituting a male-only priesthood.
I don’t get it. I really don’t. 1 Corinthians 12 seems clear enough on spiritual gifts, and doesn’t limit who might receive or use each gift. We don’t know who wrote 1 Timothy 2 with its apparent ban on women teaching, so how can we say that it came from God? And if it did, why is it in apparent conflict with Paul’s statement in Galatians that “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female.”
If there is no male or female in Christ, why would Paul be worried about women speaking in church?
Man, I’m glad the Bible is so clear on everything.
Writing
It’s curious to me that the Castro post got some traffic this week. After all, it’s an eleven-year-old post on a low-traffic blog. But the curious part is that I got bitten by a plot bunny this week that involved the Cleveland Kidnapping story.
In the UK, where abandoned babies are a rare occurrence, three have been abandoned since 2017. What’s more is that they are all directly related. They come from the same parents.
These parents have abandoned three children over the last seven years. Not “given them up for adoption.” They abandoned the babies out in public; the UK doesn’t seem to have Safe Haven laws or drop boxes.
What drives a parent to do something like that? I can maybe understand it happening once. Maybe. Three times rather boggles my mind.
What of the friends and extended family of these parents? No one is asking questions about the pregnancies? All three children were apparently full-term, and this last child still had the placenta attached.
This story and those questions led me down a dark rabbit trail involving Safe Haven Baby Drops and so forth, where multiple related babies are abandoned across the country over the course of several months or years.
Yeah, I needed one more story idea rattling around the dark corners of my mind.
Thanks for reading! Feel free to share a thought in the comments. Sign up for my infrequent newsletter here. Find some of my other writing at The Good Men Project, too. Subscribe to the blog via the link in the right sidebar or follow it on Mastodon. You can also add my RSS feed to your favorite reader.
Share your thoughts!