The Floor is Yours, Dear Reader
Soliciting Feedback for the Future
It’s approaching what I’ll generally describe as the hurricane season of the academic life: the winds are blowing, students are knocking at the door, plane tickets to far flung vistas like Beaumont and Gainesville are secured for speaking engagements. It’s going to be a wild ride for me until late March.
With that being said, I’m going to try something new: an open forum. I have my own particular hobby horses that I like to write on, and those of you who have been here for a length of time know that my concerns gravitate toward those of how ethics and the common Christian life intersect. How we live morally has deep ramifications for what the church’s common life is.
And so, with that, what would you like to hear about? One brave reader has requested transhumanism. Another one is interested in catechesis. Those are in the queue and, in the next few months, will be part of what we talk about here.
But what about you? Comments are open. This is planning season, and what seeds go into the digital ground are yours to plant.
Ethics of the Church (broadly speaking) adopting or incorporating business practices and revenue models into worship. e.g. licensing of worship music, selling tickets to a CCM "concert" (where people on stage and off ostensibly believe they are engaging in corporate worship).
I understand and want to uphold the good of paying artists for their valuable work.
I'm less sure about adopting the revenue models of the day, which introduce legal restrictions into a activity that I think we would all consider "holy."
This even affects folks like me, in a denomination that practices exclusive psalmody with a capella congregational singing. Our denominational publisher restricts the recording and streaming of singing from the psalter because of the licensed tunes and copyright on the lyrics.
It feels wrong, improper and unwise to me, but it also seems like I'm sort of alone on this issue.
A few of the questions I’ve been thinking about and trying to understand over the past few months ---
-The relationship between ethics and theology.
-what is Church (capital C)?
-The fracturing of the church/splitting of denominations etc/ how to think about this,
-How to leave a church “well”.