a few things recently on my mind...

I just wanted to take a moment to post a few of the ideas/questions that have been floating around in my head for a few months. Some of them are ideas that hit me randomly while others were provoked by readings or classes. 

- Hospitality is responsibility without the "should". In other words, hospitality is what happens when "responsible" behavior is performed without any sense of obligation. In this sense, hospitality is superior to responsibility.

- Why is it that, in the so-called "Abrahamic" monotheistic traditions that God can control (and does control) everything in nature, but cannot seem to control you and me? In the scriptures, God controls the rain and the produce of the Earth. He can make "she bears" come out of the woods and maul blasphemers. He can "number our days". We even see that he can make entire nations behave in ways that he desires. But yet he cannot force us to conform to his standards? I know that in my more devout days I would have found it preferable that God would override my will and force me to do whatever it was he wanted. As it turns out, however, he either cannot or does not. Why are the proverbial "you" and "I" so different from anything else? 

- It seems to me that Jesus, during his ministry, was tapping into a mass cultural fear of deus absconditus among Jews in the first century CE - having not produced a prophet of note in 400 years. His "yoke", and the advent of his "kingdom" on the coat-tails of John the Baptist, were a powerful response to this collective cultural fear. 

- The continued cultural significance (and I hesitate to call it "popularity") of Jesus - even two thousand years after his death - speaks not simply to his uniqueness in history, but to how insecure and "homeless" we humans feel here on Earth. Our need for him is not so much soteriological, but psychological - we continue to feel a deep-seated, primal need to be rescued from ourselves and healed from our self-inflicted wounds. The kind of "saving" that Jesus can provide will never be achieved, but always longed for. The messianic expectancy is a hope for healing, but never a fulfillment. In this sense the telos is forever without an eschaton. The justice of the messiah, too, is kairotic (based in kairos time) and not in chronos time. In this sense it cannot ever "be".