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I thought of you Ham, when a fellow harmonica player sent me this photo. Add a few more, and, Enjoy!!

i'm putting this discussion here because it has a lot to do with the way international in my life because the way international made fun of charities and giving to charities or doing charitable work so much that i saw a lot of people being very hard hearted about giving and would tithe and give offerings only if they were "operating believing" to get something back from god like he was a geenie in the magic lamp to command or something, not like giving was a gift to the giver more than it was a gift to the receiver, but anyway this also has a lot to do with being asked "where is the compassion" and feeling like i was in the way international again and being cornered and badgered into making myself accountable to somebody else's definition of acceptability and that somebody else had no clue about me and my life whatsoever, and i had the feeling that some others felt the same way, so i thought about what if people had the chance to blow their own horns a little bit? so even though i don't get on here or anywhere else and shout it from the prayer forums or any other forum or anything, i go to hospice and i also go to the "welfare" hospitals and sit with "unclaimed" people that have no visitors or support outside of the hospital staff and stuff like that. it's something i started doing when i grew up after experiencing up close and personal all my life how the way international abandoned sick and dying people after having isolated them from friends and family for decades. and it's hard work a whole lot of the time because people are dying and are very sick and when i'm the only person they have to talk to or am the last person to hear their last words, well that's hard a lot, but it's also a place of honor in their lives that they will let me in like that, and it's like very holy and i get to see glimpses of what i can only imagine might be the closest thing to a supreme being i'll ever get and it's scary and it's holy and it's moving and it's draining and it's hard and it's intimate and it's beyond the sum total of them and me every single time. so that's my horn to blow. what's yours?

James D. G. Dunn is just about the best current New Testament scholar I've found in my all too brief and spotty survey of the literature. He has written a number of good books. Two that may bear on recent topics of this thread are The Partings of the Ways: between Christianity and Judaism and their significance for the character of Christianity (1991) and Unity and diversity in the New Testament: an inquiry into the character of earliest Christianity (1977). Dunn holds that just as there was a spectrum of beliefs in Second Temple Judaism, there was also a spectrum of beliefs among the people, initially Judeans, who came to Christianity. He believes the thing that held Christians together was the confession "Jesus is Lord". This confession contains two elements, "Jesus", a real man who was really crucified, really died, and was really resurrected, and "Lord", the truth that this man has been invested with some sort of divine authority. If we reconstructed the diversity of New Testament positions on a left-right scale, with right being conservative and left being for change, then the extreme left would be the gnostics, the moderate left would be Paul, the center would be Peter, the moderate right would be James, and the extreme right would be the ebionites. On the extreme left the gnostics went too far for most of the church to consider them to be Christians, because they denied that Jesus was a real man. They played up the "divine" business too much. On the right, the ebionites went too far in the other direction by regarding Jesus as just another man, with no special, unique exercise of divine authority. The gnostic and the ebionite positions were BOTH rejected by the majority of people who considered themselves to be Christians, but the positions of BOTH Paul and James were considered to be valid. It was through Peter that the church was held together in its early days. It would seem that Luther read some of his aversion to the legalism of medieval Roman Catholicism back into Second Temple Judaism, and ignored the context of some of the things Paul wrote about "grace through faith". That may be why Luther thought that James should not have been included in the canon. But the early Christians themselves regarded James' opinions to be solidly within the bounds of their faith. All for now. Love, Steve

Would you like a jelly baby? Sic 'em K-9!

I don't think I've watched all the DVD's for The MP Flying Circus yet,... But I can go toe to toe with anyone on MP and the Holy Grail. As you gathered, nyunknown, I'm a Big Python Fan even though all that was cancelled long before I was born.

PBS used to play "The flying circus" . . . they're all my favorite :)