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Month: June 2006

Uncategorized

Counsellors or Something

Posted on June 5, 2006 by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

Driving home from friend's place Saturday night, past midnight, My wife Debbie and I saw a young woman walking east along the edge of the highway by Anthon...

Christianity/Peace

Mirror Images

Posted on June 4, 2006 by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

In mimetic theory, it is not differences that ultimately cause violence. It is the erosion and effacement of differences that spawns violence. And of course vio...

Atonement/Christianity/Religion

An Open Letter to Christianity Today

Posted on June 3, 2006 by stephen t berg / 9 Comments

With respect, the following is an Open letter to Christianity Today regarding Pastor Mark Dever’s article, “Nothing But the Blood” (CTeditor@c...

Atonement/Christianity

Toward True Atonement

Posted on June 2, 2006 by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

When we approach the New Testament with "mercy not sacrifice" as our rightful frame of reference, the notion of penal substitution is seen for what it...

Posts pagination

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Over the coming months, I’ll be slowly retiring Grow Mercy. This Easter marks 20 years and some 1500 posts. (And here, a deep bow to you, for reading and/or responding.) I’ll not, however, be retiring the impulse behind Grow Mercy, but will be shifting, exploring, following a hybridized urge, and a genre to suit. For me, what these decades have increasingly revealed is how writing is a spiritual path. Now, for whatever time and energy remains for me, I’ll be tilting more toward The Ragged Psalmist, still inchoate, but the handle feels like it fits. I do hope you’ll subscribe.

Why — The Ragged Psalmist?

Because some stubborn ember, still warm, compels me to write some cobbled songs — praise and lament, cries and sighs — and sound them back to the sacred Mystery.

To throw a wrench into a world geared up for business; to resist the moneychangers in their corporate temples — because poetry is political, and light is its administrative wing.

Because old lies and old words screw us over and must be remade to tell the truth; because our glossary of mockery needs burial, and the lexicon that’s left needs anointing.

To strive to honour the life of a sparrow; attend the spell of a dead star — whose light we still see; to feel, down to the bone, the quantum foam, we all flail in.

To thicken compassion and thin out aggression; to oppose injustice and hate in a way that excludes no one, not even the hater.

To let failure, discouragement, suffering and perishing have their say, without any spoon of bromide; to let joy, delight, and beauty come as they may.

To penetrate darkness and delusion — and so discover all this love in us.

Because mindfulness and mercy need constant oxygen.

Because in the time that’s left I want to tattoo the implications of our “forgiving victim” on the body suit of my heart.

Because reality points to unity — and we must hurry to catch up.

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