Classic City Rev

Blaise Pascal was a seventeenth century French mathematician.  Yet, Pascal was much more than that.  He was  also an inventor and later in his life a Roman Catholic theologian.  He was educated in the ways of mathematics by his father who was also a mathematician.  His philosophical and theological training was much broader though not in the traditional university settings of the day. Pascal's work as a theologian is notable in a time in which the Roman Catholic Church was reforming itself within as the Protestant Reformation was taking hold outside the bounds of the Church.  Perhaps Pascal's most famous contribution to theological thought is something called Pascal's Wager.  It is recorded in a theological work he wrote entitled Pensees. The Wager is basically Pascal's argument for the existence of God. The argument essentially says that one if one believes in God and God does not exist, the believer loses nothing.  Conversely if one fails to bel...

It is not uncommon in recent days to learn of statues that have been taken down by governmental action or sometimes from mob action.   Many of the those statues have been in the South and many of them have been images of Confederate Generals from the period of our Civil War.  Other statues have been monuments to those who fought for the Confederate Army.  There have also been discussion of the renaming of military bases which are named for Confederate generals. In other instances, statues have come under attack because the principal of the statue had been an owner of slaves.  There have been changes of school names, street names and building names because the namesake of those buildings has been found in disfavor. I am a born and bread Southerner, a native Georgian and have never lived anywhere else.  I am a graduate of my home state's University, the University of Georgia, which by the way is the oldest chartered state university in our nation....

I have a love/hate relationship with much of today's technology.  In particular I have a love/hate relationship with the cell phone.  I'm not even sure the term cell phone is the correct term to use because the devices we call our phones are used for so many different things other than voice phone calls.   Two of the most common non cell phone uses are text messaging and picture taking.  We also use the phone to check e-mails, look at web sites, stream television content, play video games and keep our calendars.  I've only scratched the surface of what our phones can do.  There's probably an app that can cook an omelet. Cell phones are powerful devices as well.  According to Real Clear Science an i-phone has 100,000 times more computing power than the Apollo 11 spacecraft which first landed humankind on the moon.  I will admit that on the one hand I appreciate the device I use.  It has certainly provided me with a multitu...

A spin-off discussion that has reared its head in the aftermath of the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmad Arbery has been the issue of speech or more particularly the issue of appropriate speech.  What words are we to use when we speak so as not to give offense to others and should that be our goal in our speech to be unoffensive? To begin this discussion we must have an understanding of what it means to have free speech in our society.  The First Amendment of the Constitution says "Congress shall make no law.....abridging the freedom of speech."  In other words, the government has no right to control what you or I say.  We are entitled, if we so wish, to say most anything we wish.   What the First Amendment does not say is that we have a right to exercise our free speech in every forum available.  For example, I have a Facebook page.  It is provided to me free of charge.  While I am given free reign as a rule to say wh...

If there is one thing that has  been made abundantly clear in light of the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd, is that we as a society still have a ways to go when it comes to settling our racial questions.  Thus, there is a need for greater conversations concerning racial matters, in our homes, in our communities and in our churches.   One of the things that hinders us from having these conversations is that the conversations are often short-circuited.  Things get said that we find offensive or things get said which don't fit our particular  paradigm and we withdraw from the conversation.   Perhaps if we had a set of ground rules to guide our racial conversations the conversations could be more productive.  I claim no expertise in this area but in the last few weeks I have done some listening. I have observed some stumbling blocks that have prevented productive conversations.  To that end I am going to offer some simple g...

I know there have been other weeks in which the cumulative effect of the week's news left me with a feeling of sorrow as great as the sorrow that I am feeling today.  Yet, as I sit here on a Saturday morning reflecting on the week that has been, my heart is as heavy as I can remember it being. This week saw the 100,000th death from COVID-19 in our country.  100,000, that is more than the capacity of Sanford Stadium.  100,000 is the approximate number of United Methodists that gather each week for worship in North Georgia.  In just a few short months, 100,000 of us dead.   Perhaps the rate of death has peaked.  However, the thing about any virus is that it doesn't go away.  It is still lurking in the shadows waiting to rear its ugly head.  We can't drop a bomb on the virus and have it go away.  Maybe a vaccine and treatment will be forthcoming  but until then we are stalked by a silent killer. Yet, our week was just gett...

As a native Georgian, high school football has always been a part of the background music of my life.  I played the game very poorly when I was in high school.  I later coached the game during my time as a teacher.  I've done some volunteer coaching after becoming a pastor and for nine years was the public address announcer for a local high school team. One thing about attending a high school football game is that one declares which team one supports when one enters the stadium.  One either sits on the home side or the visitors side of the stadium. A person generally supports the team that is represented by the side of field on which one is sitting.  Some high school stadiums even arrange the parking lots so the visitors and the home fans can park separately.  So it is that at high school football games one has to pick a side. That works great for high school football.  It doesn't necessarily work for life. However, in the polarized culture in...