Virtual Methodist

Rarely in the time that I've been blogging, and even before that when I was merely a spectator in this weird and wonderful virtual world, has one subject so dominated the blogsphere for so long a time... Haiti... I posted my own semi-coherent rant last week prompted by Pat Robertson's nonsense... But one week on from the disaster the flow of words continues... So I thought I'd just point you in the direction of some of the more interesting ones I have come across... You might have already seen them, but maybe not... Going back to Pat Robertson's pronouncements on Haiti's pact with the Devil, well that has been both refuted and nuanced in great detail (according to Franklin Graham he "miss-spoke"), but for my money the best response came from the pages of the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, which posted a "Letter from Satan" . A more cerebral response was the BBC's "Why does God allow natural disasters?" where they unleashed tame...

When I was at theological college, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we lily-livered Arminians shared many of our classes and spent most of our week with our Calvinist friends in the local Presbyterian Theological College, a relationship which has only recently been terminated to, I believe, the detriment of both denominations. While I was there many of my Presbyterian colleagues would have regarded Calvin himself as "unsound" they were so roundly reformed... This resulted in some (generally) good humoured banter, and with the exception of the annual football matches, relationships were fairly good. In Old and New Testament classes you could see that many of the Presbyterian students were more conservative, if not fundamentalist than we Methodists (but we had a few people in that grouping ourselves). In systematic theology I heard enough about Calvin and Barth to do me a lifetime... apparently Arminians never write theology! But it was in practical theology that you reall...