Tag Archives: theology

Straining Gnats and Swallowing Camels

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"You blind guides, straining out a gnat and swallowing a camel!" – Matthew 23:24

The irony in the following was too good for me to pass up.  My favorite (I mean that. He’s a nice fellow when not on his soap box.) Bible thumpin’, street preachin’, Jack Chick resemblin’ Fundamentalist, Rand, had an unpleasant exeperience at a church he recently visited.

"We visited a Brethren Gospel Hall on the Lord’s Day and we enjoyed the sermon. There was however, a weird moment, at the Lord’s Table. The problem was with one of the elements. It was the bread. They distributed a loaf of bread; a loaf of leavened bread that you would find at any bakery."

The following day he explained why that was wrong.

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“Father” Bill

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An article in today’s Pitt News has some misleading information.  In the section addressing Lent, "Father" Bill Hausen, of Christ Hope Church, is quoted. Hausen broke away from the Catholic Church in 2004. He has been excommunicated and is no longer longer recognized as a priest by the Church, the sacraments he offers are not valid, and attending services at Christ Hope does not satisfy one’s Sabbath obligation.

Don’t Pray For Peter

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Here’s an interesting exchange between Peter (aka Theomorph) and a commenter about the efficacy of intercessory prayer.

“I still think that so long as anyone believes in the same God who made an appearance in the book of Job, the idea of prayer getting a person what he or she wants is theologically unsound. If I may paraphrase in the vernacular, God basically told Job, ‘Don’t f*** with me; I do what I want and you can’t stop me.'”

Still Amusing the Church to Death

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Remember the post I wrote about Chuck Colsen’s critique of trite worship music? I agreed with Colsen’s distaste for “Draw Me Close to You” and its ilk. My buddy Rob didn’t. When discussion on both blogs died, I figured the matter was closed for the time being. I didn’t think the article had legs beyond my little corner of the net, but it seems I was wrong.

Sam Storms of Enjoying God Ministries and Justin Tayler of Between Two Worlds threw their two cents in with Rob. I wouldn’t have know that, though, if Godblogger heavyweight Tim Challies hadn’t joined the fray. I’m happy to say he’s on my side. 😉 Challies presents a seven-part test for “whether a particular song is suitable for worshiping our God, especially in a corporate setting”, borrowed from a book by Elmer Towns and Ed Stetzer. He also adds an eighth criterion of his own.

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Stem Cell Update

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Researchers in both the USA and Germany claim to have produced embryonic-like stem cells from testicular cells. The Germans published the results of their work on mice in Nature last week; the Americans claimed to have done similar things with human testes (ouch), but have not published in a peer-reviewed journal, but rather presented it at a conference. The group that did the work in America is also studying similar work on ovaries.

Presumably these cells can be entirely legitimate from a Catholic bioethical standpoint, provided that the germ cell (i.e., testicular or ovarian tissue) material is donated and procured in an ethical manner (which can get complicated, but we’ll leave that for another entry). The problem with embryonic research to date is that the process involves killing or harming human embryos, and perhaps involves involves cloning to boot. Since this embryonic-like cells are taken from adult donors, this intrinsic stumbling-block is removed.

In addition to avoiding that big ethical issue, this technique, if it works, would also avoid some serious technical barriers facing embryonic stem cells. If you give a patient stem cells derived from an embryo, you must either try to create a cloned embryo or else face the risk of tissue rejection. Human cloning has yet to done, now that Dr. Hwang was exposed as a fraud, and any therapy that involves such a concept faces quite a few issues with expense, technical validation, etc.

In other news, Geron Corporation, which holds the rights to the original human embryonic stem cell lines that Dr. Thompson derived at the University of Wisconsin Madison (thus sparking this whole debate) is preparing to launch a clinical trial of human embryonic stell cells on human patients–and just to clarify, unlike the embryonic-like stem cells that I mentioned above, these ones are derived from destroyed human embryos. I believe that this is the first such trial to happen in the USA in several years–in the last trial on Parkinsons Disease patients, the subjects’ symptoms got worse after getting the cells.