Here's a response to Ross Douthat's thought-provoking New York Times piece on liberal Christianity from a member and former senior warden of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Louisburg. It's too long to run in print. Read Douthat's piece here if you missed it.

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I could not disagree more with Mr. Douthat's assertion that John Shelby Spong, retired bishop of Newark, is responsible for the decline in membership in The Episcopal Church - U.S.

Far from it.  Bishop Spong recognized a problem, described the problem in simple terms and pointed the Church toward solutions.  His voice was the voice of reason   He simply said that "In the light of our ever-expanding knowledge and understanding of the physical and natural sciences and of the place of our Earth within the universe, we must find new ways to express our Christian theology.  If we do not, the time will soon come when no educated person will believe us."

The following 12 points summarize Bishop Spong's argument:
1.      Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead; so most theological talk about God today is meaningless.  A new way must be found to speak about God.
2.      Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it makes no sense to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt.
3.      The biblical story of the perfect and finished creation from which human beings fell into sin is pre-Darwinian mythology and post-Darwinian nonsense.
4.      The virgin birth, understood as literal biology, makes Christ's divinity, as traditionally understood, impossible.
5.      The miracle stories of the New Testament can no longer be interpreted in a post-Newtonian world as supernatural events performed by an incarnate deity.
6.      The view of the cross as the sacrifice for the sins of the world is a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God and must be dismissed.
7.      Resurrection is an action of God. Jesus was raised into the meaning of God. It therefore cannot be a physical resuscitation occurring inside human history.
8.      The story of the Ascension assumed a three-tiered universe and therefore cannot be translated into the concepts of a post-Copernican space age.
9.      There is no external, objective, revealed standard written in scripture or on tablets of stone that will govern our ethical behavior for all time.
10.     Prayer cannot be a request made to a theistic deity to act in human history in a particular way.
11.     The hope for life after death must be separated forever from the behavior control mentality of reward and punishment. The Church must abandon its reliance on guilt as a motivator of behavior.
12.     All human beings bear God's image and must be respected for what that person is. Therefore, no external description of one's being, whether based on race, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, can properly be used as the basis for either rejection or discrimination.

Now, honestly, who can find fault with that?  Remember that we are living in the year of our Lord 2012.
 

Peter V. Andrews
Louisburg
 

Ask around about favorite months, and some people might name June — a nice month for weddings. There’s also October (great leaf colors, depending on where you are), or March madness and the onset of spring.

Almost no one, however, will say January, which might be the most dreaded, hated month of the year. February isn’t too popular, either, but does at least have the advantage of being short. By contrast, January can seem interminable — 31 short dreary days and long frigid nights, with not much to do except contemplate another year long gone.

Or as an old-English rhyme puts it: "The blackest month in all the year is the month of Janiveer."

With so much stacked against it, it’s no surprise that January can seem...well, cranky about its lot. Now that another January is upon us, we rang it up for a chat.

Q: Hello, January, how are you?
A: Swell. Just...swell.
Q: What's the matter?
A: For starters, do you have to say my name like that? It almost sounds like you're holding your nose.
Q: I thought I was just saying it normally.
A: Yeah, that's the problem with my name. January. I've always hated it, you know. Other months have all the fun, and better names, too. "March," that's nice and short and active. Forceful, even. "June," same thing, almost sounds like "jump." "August," what better adjective could you ask for? And all those "-ber" months at the end of the year — September, October, November, December — they just roll right off the tongue. But my name, people almost wince when they say it.
Q: Where does your name come from anyway?
A: The Greek god Janus, whose name means "door." The god of beginnings. He also has two faces, one to look to the past and one to look to the future. February gets the god of purification, March the god of war, May the goddess of spring. But I get this two-faced freak who can't make up his mind if he's living in the past or the future. Just my luck.
Q: Don't you think you’re being just a little defensive?
A: Maybe so. But how would you feel if the only things people associated with you were hangovers, maxed-out credit card bills, busted new year's resolutions and Seasonal Affective Disorder?
Q: Oh, come on. You get all the good football bowl games.
A: But not the Super Bowl, not anymore. That little punk February gets it, the no good so-and-so.
Q: Do things get pretty heated among the months? Do you spend a lot of time ribbing each other?
A: God, yes. March still gets pretty uppity with me, since he used to be the first month of the year under the old 10-month Roman calendar. December is always such a pompous goody-goody. And ever since 9/11, September has been just insufferable. There's talk of retiring that date now.
Q: I'm sure lots of fascinating, important things have happened in January.
A: Name one.
Q: Uh...
A: The Challenger space shuttle blew up on Jan. 28, 1986.
Q: Oh, no.
A: Jesus was circumcised on new year’s day.
Q: Uh...
A: And the drinking straw was patented on Jan. 3, 1888.
Q: January, I think we're really reaching now.
A: See what I mean?
Q: Don't you get Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday?
A: Yes, there’s that — Jan. 15. I also get Mozart (Jan. 27) and Elvis Presley (Jan. 8). But also Richard Nixon (Jan. 9).
Q: Hey, a lot of people would probably call that a good thing.
A: You're too kind.

The March 29 front-page article "Debunking dogma makes prof a star" brought some strong responses, some of them taking The N&O to task even for printing the story, especially on the front page. There will be several letters in the upcoming Sunday Forum, but in the meantime, here are some others, online-only.