It took a year to read the Bible, then almost 9 months to read the Apocrypha. Now, I'm going to try to offer reflections on the Narrative Lectionary. But, I won't be posting daily--at least, for a while.

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Can these bones live?, a Reflection on Ezekiel 37:1-10

The Lord asked, "Can these bones live?"

I thought about Ezekiel's vision when I read the article ‘Religion’ is Going Extinct; Religion Isn’t by Louis Ruprecht.

A team of mathematicians concluded that religion was becoming as distinct as dinosaurs. But, there's extinct and there's, let's say emergent. Here's how Ruprecht interprets the data:
Now, if we take the language of “extinction” seriously—as we should—as well as the evolutionary theory it seems to presuppose, then a better way to read this data might be to suggest that a number of recognizably religious traditions are undergoing some significant modern mutations, such that the affiliations into which they are turning bear only a partial resemblance to what preceded them. Dinosaurs don’t just go extinct, they became birds—that’s the idea.

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