Arizona Center for Theological Studies, ACTS

This is what the entrance to heaven looks like ❤️

A seminal book in biblical studies that opened for me the world of the Gospels and the life and times of Jesus.

The Historical Jesus: The Life Of A Jewish Mediterranean Peasant - Dr. John Dominic Crossan "He comes as yet unknown into a hamlet of Lower Galilee. He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at a subsistence level to know e...

This book was one of the seminal books in my own way of understanding Jesus and the Gospels.
Set aside some time to listen to Dr. Crossan speak.

The Historical Jesus: The Life Of A Jewish Mediterranean Peasant - Dr. John Dominic Crossan "He comes as yet unknown into a hamlet of Lower Galilee. He is watched by the cold, hard eyes of peasants living long enough at a subsistence level to know e...

Today is the Feast Day of St. Mary Magdalene, who has been called the second-most important woman in the Gospels, after Jesus’ mother, Mary. The Gospels mention her 12 times, more than most of the apostles.

Her name comes from her origin in Magdala, a region in northern Galilee. The Gospels of Mark and Luke tell us that Jesus cast seven demons out of Mary Magdalene. After that, she traveled with Jesus and his followers, and played a prominent role in witnessing Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection.

She remained at the foot of the cross when most of Jesus’ followers left him, and she is remembered for her courage in faithfully standing with Jesus even as he faced death.

Mary Magdalene is the only person noted by all four Gospels as testifying to Jesus’ resurrection. John and Mark portray her as the first witness of the resurrection, and St. Thomas Aquinas honored her with the title “the Apostle to the Apostles” because she was the first to share the news of the resurrection.

For generations, tradition confused Mary Magdalene with two other women of the Gospel. She is not the same person as Mary of Bethany, who is sister to Martha and Lazarus. She is also not the unnamed woman of Luke’s Gospel (7:36-50), who was uncritically assumed to be a pr******te.

According to one legend, after the Ascension she journeyed to Rome where she was admitted to Tiberias Caesar's court because of her high social standing. After describing how poorly Pilate had administered justice at Jesus’ trial, she told Caesar that Jesus had risen from the dead. To help explain the resurrection, she picked up an egg from the dinner table. Caesar responded that a human being could no more rise from the dead than the egg in her hand turn red. The egg turned red immediately, which is why red eggs have been exchanged at Easter for centuries in the Byzantine East.

At the core of Jesus’ movement two-thousand years ago was a personal invitation to follow him in the ways of empathy, mercy, and justice. It was at its heart, an appeal to the voluntary orientation of the heart of each human being he crossed paths with. It was something to be embraced or rejected without fear of repercussions.

Actual Followers of Jesus Don't Want Conservatives' Compulsory Christianity There’s nothing more dangerous than professed Christians who have no real interest in Jesus. They’re rather easy to spot if you’re paying attention. They’re usually the ones most loudly claiming things like religious liberty while methodically swallowing up the personal freedoms and elementa...

This is a great reflection. Bass writes: Jesus loved meals. They knew that. They’d had so many together. Go back through the gospels and see how many of the stories take place at tables, distributing food, or inviting people to supper. Indeed, some have suggested that Jesus primary work was organizing suppers as a way to embody the coming kingdom of God. Throughout his ministry, Jesus welcomed everyone — to the point of contention with his critics — to the table. Tax collectors, sinners, women, Gentiles, the poor, faithful Jews, and ones less so. Jesus was sloppy with supper invitations. He never thought about who would be seated next to whom. He made the disciples crazy with his lax ideas about dinner parties. All he wanted was for everybody to come, to be at the table, and share food and conversation.
“I think of Jesus,” wrote theologian Beatrice Bruteau, “setting up these Suppers somewhat on the order of the ‘base communities’ of liberation theology.” Gatherings of the Kingdom of God.
What if Maundy Thursday was that? The Last Supper of the Old World. The last meal under Rome, the last meal under any empire. And it is the First Feast of the Kingdom That Has Come. The first meal of the new age, the world of mutual service, reciprocity, equality, abundance, generosity, and unending thanksgiving. Pass the cup, keep it going, hand to hand, filled and refilled, time after time. This night is the final night of dominion, the end of slavery; and this night is the first night of communion, the beginning of true freedom: “I will no longer call you servants but friends.

The Holy Thursday Revolution Day 38 of A Grounded Lent

wow this is amazing:
As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it,
Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and ruin pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods. The liturgical movement must become a revolutionary movement, seeking to overthrow the forces that continue to destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.

Higher Up The Mountain Mysticism Isn't The Point

Richard Rohr's Daily Meditations
From the Center for Action and Contemplation
Change Is Never Comfortable
Father Richard writes about the role of prophets and priests in the process of collective transformation. Prophets remove our illusions and help us see reality clearly, which for those of us in settled institutions often feels like a loss of security. Priests lead us on a path of returning to meaning and transcendence:
The role of the prophet is to direct and legitimate necessary deconstruction. The prophet’s path is of descent, and is never popular, nor easy. It is about letting go of illusion and toppling false gods. The prophets are often killed.
True priests talk of union, communion, love, transcendence, religion, connecting this world and the next world, and giving back a coherent world of meaning. Everybody usually likes the priests and they quickly become established and comfortable in almost all cultures.
But we’ve had too much priesthood and not nearly enough prophecy, in my humble opinion. The result has often been religion for religion’s sake. How can we envision a new world when we have never fallen away from the old? [1]
Religious scholar Diana Butler Bass writes of Christianity’s tension between the pastoral and the prophetic when it comes to upholding the institutional status quo:
Religious faiths struggle between the pastoral and the prophetic, comfort and agitation. In a very real way, institutions are inherently pastoral—they seek to maintain those things that give comfort by baptizing shared values and virtues of a community. They reinforce the way things are (or were) through appeals to divine or supernatural order. They are always slow to change. Institutions resist prophets. Prophets question. They push for things to be different. They push people to behave better toward one another. They want change.
The history of Christianity can be told as a story of the tension between order and prophecy. Jesus came as a prophet, one who challenged and transformed Judaism. A charismatic community grew up around his teachings and eventually formed into the church. The church organized, and then became an institution. The institution provided guidance and meaning for many millions. And then it became guarded, protective of the power and wealth it garnered, the influence it wielded, and [the] salvation it alone provided.
Many of the people in the church did not seem to notice, but some did. What the church taught seemed at odds with their experience of life or God. . . . They questioned the way things were done. They experimented with new ideas and spiritual practices. . . . They bent the rules and often broke them. The established church typically ignored them, sometimes tolerated them, often branded them heretics, tried to control them, and occasionally killed them. When enough people joined the ranks of the discontented, the institutional church had to pay attention. In the process, and sometimes unintentionally, the church opened itself up for genuine change and renewal. . . .
Organized religion fears such outbursts; but spiritual outbursts almost always precede real reform. Might spiritual discontent be today’s prophetic edge, needling institutions to listen, to change, to be more responsive and relevant? [2]
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2001, 2020), 196.
[2] Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Church and the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 88–89, 91.

This is an interesting article. I like the parsing of words which shows that translating from one language to another (Greek to English) is frought with challenges that are more dependent on worldview/ideology of the translators who choose to translate not in the context of the original community, but more in the context of the current time. In the end, does this matter much anymore? Or does it fit into the narratives of those who want to use scripture for their own purpose.

Were Mary and Joseph Married or Engaged at Jesus’ Birth? - Biblical Archaeology Society Were Mary and Joseph married or engaged when they traveled to Bethlehem? Biblical scholar Mark Wilson examines what the gospels say in this Bible History Daily guest post.

The Unmaking of the White Christian Worldview As I came of age in Woodville Heights Baptist Church, on the white working-class side of Jackson, Miss., I internalized a cycle of sin, confession and repentance as a daily part of my life. The power and sheer cultural dominance of white Christianity in America historically bound these contradictory...