A Slight Delay

Blogs on religion proliferate like weeds on the web. Unfortunately, they all too often settle into trite cliches, facile dogmatism, and sloppy theology. A refreshing exception comes to us courtesy of Amicus Dei, a blog written by Pastor Chuck Warnock. Once you’ve read his writing, both there and on his other blogs, such as Confessions of a Small-Church Pastor, you come to realize that any preconceptions you might’ve had about Baptist pastors pretty much go out the window. At least mine did.

 You wouldn’t have to go very far for the evidence. Amicus Dei’s latest post, The Disney-fication of War, takes as its starting point the language used to describe warfare which, as he rightly notes, have taken on a disturbingly Disney-esque tone. But he doesn’t stop there; soon enough, Warnock is exploring how this illuminates a larger trend, with us since the first Gulf War, toward making war a sanitized affair suitable for family viewing.

Perhaps the best thing about the blog, at least to this tired reader, is its implicit acknowledgement that there’s a wider world out there, beyond the social/wedge issues that have come to dominate not only the discourse over religion in this country, but increasingly, to dominate and define religion itself. There’s a (sadly neglected) place for rational thought, tempered discourse, and reasoned exploration of religion, both in the public and private spheres, and it seems that Warnock’s writing fills the niche nicely.

Tags: Christianity, Religion, religious writing

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Religion, Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.