1 – Where can I find the most spiritual place in the city.
2 – What is the taste of the city and where can I get some?
3 – What’s the best place in town that visitors never go to?
4 – Where would you go to get the definitive photograph of the city?
5 – What is the best beach/green place round here?
6 – What makes people laugh here?
7- Where is the prettiest place to go for a walk?
8 – Where is the place that most makes you happy?
9 – What makes people come and live here and why?
10 – Why did they build it right here?
One response to “Eid, Pride and Abraham’s Sacrifice”
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As one who grew up(?) in churches leaning toward the view “it’s a tough story for a tough world, how else would God be just?” in varying degrees, I agree the face-value-narrative understanding of the story is repellant.
One thing stood out for the first time during Sunday’s reading: the plurality in Abraham’s line – “…and we will return to you”. I’ve been idly wondering about that since.
It doesn’t make the story wholly acceptable as Abraham still ploughs on ever closer.
But if one’s goal is to find a “by faith, Abraham” in there, better to say it’s the prior confidence that things will somehow work out well (which I thought was how Hebrews was trying to define it), than to locate the commendable quality in violence (which, by rabbiting on about resurrection, Hebrews does).In the absence of other clear & wholly mitigating contexts in which to place the story, certainly it’s simplest, easiest and probably best to file it under “that’s how they saw God back then” and move swiftly on.
Oofft.
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