During the first half of this year, newspapers and newscasts were filled with reports about potential abuse occurring within the Catholic Church. Allegations have poured in from half a dozen countries, including 300 accusations from Germany, the home of the current Pope. Many Catholics and non-Catholics are fed up with the Catholic Church.
Many more people are fed up with church in general. Dan Kimball has written a book entitled They Like Jesus But Not the Church.[i] In it, Kimball reports that many today find Jesus attractive but not the church. They feel that the church is too politically motivated.
And, in his book God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything Christopher Hitchens writes about the ills of all institutional religion.[ii] He states that religion is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children.”
There’s a lot of hostility these days toward religion in general and toward the church in particular.
This is nothing new, of course. Even in Jesus’ day there was ill-will toward religion. Mark, one of the four biographers of Jesus’ life, focuses on this ill-will. His Gospel includes 10 occasions during which Jesus and religious leaders got into conflict. This summer, we’re using these 10 conflicts to reflect on the difference between being religious and following Jesus.
Read More »Irreligious: Forsaking Religion and Finding Jesus’ Sabbath (Mk. 3:1-6) Chris Altrock – June 13, 2010