When my parents “downsized” to a smaller home a few years ago, they invited my siblings and me to take anything we wanted that they weren’t taking with the new move. One of the treasures I snagged was a pale yellow plastic bottle opener. You don’t see this type of bottle opener much anymore.
Read MoreThere are few words in our language as warm and cuddly as Dogma. Doesn’t that word just feel like a linguistic hug? On the contrary, most of us recoil when we hear it. Our defenses go up. Instead of a hug it sounds like someone is trying to put us in a linguistic strait jacket. But the original meaning of dogma was “that which seems good.”
Of course, the word dogma takes on different meanings in different contexts. In the Church in means “a religious truth established by Divine Revelation and defined by the Church.” In other words, a “definitive teaching” or a core belief that defines who we are. The Episcopal Church has just two dogmas. You may not know them as dogma per se, but they will not surprise you.
Read MoreBack in the late 4th and early 5th centuries – late 300’s and early 400’s – a British monk named Pelagius caused a stir in the early Church. At the time, Christianity had been legal and then the official religion of the Roman Empire for a few decades. Pelagius went to teach in Rome and saw that the Christians there had become very lax. He wanted to firm them up. That was a good idea, but along the way he developed some errant teachings. Among them was this: People are born essentially good and our sins are separate, errant acts that we are able to stop and therefore we must stop them.
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