Shows
Practicing Gospel PodcastTheology in the Capitalocene with Joerg Rieger PGE 112In this episode I speak with Professor Joerg Rieger about his book, Theology in the Capitalocene: Ecology, Identity, Class, and Solidarity. Professor Rieger explains why the term, “Capitalocene” should be used instead of the term “Anthropocene.” He helps us understand what is happening because of the Capitalocene, especially as it negatively impacts in a new way many of the issues relating to social justice–issues such as global warming, classism, racism, sexism. queerism, and labor. He also outlines the way theologies and religions have negatively contributed to the development of the Capitalocene. However, Professor Rieger provides us with alternatives and offers...
2026-02-231h 02
Spontane VerbrechenSpontane Verbrechen - Folge 79 - Blinde WutBarbara und Rudolph Schöngeist leben in Dannenberg. Doch nach einer Draisinenfahrt kehrt einer von beiden nicht mehr zurück. Doch nicht nur die Polizei ermittelt, sondern auch die Corpus Versicherung und schickt den Österreicher Gustav Jodelhammer. Eine Folge, die nichts für schwache Nerven ist und endlich das Schlüssellochsyndrom erläutert.
True Crime reicht dir nicht mehr? Du magst Kriminalgeschichten? Hier kommt ein ganz neues Podcast Genre: SPONTANE VERBRECHEN ist UnTrue Crime! Und der erste und einzige Podcast seiner Art. Alles ist zu 100% wahr... bis auf den Teil, den sich Stephan Ziron und Martin Papke spontan improvisiert ausdenken. Nichts...
2025-02-2352 min
Spontane VerbrechenSpontane Verbrechen - Folge 79 - Blinde WutBarbara und Rudolph Schöngeist leben in Dannenberg. Doch nach einer Draisinenfahrt kehrt einer von beiden nicht mehr zurück. Doch nicht nur die Polizei ermittelt, sondern auch die Corpus Versicherung und schickt den Österreicher Gustav Jodelhammer. Eine Folge, die nichts für schwache Nerven ist und endlich das Schlüssellochsyndrom erläutert.
True Crime reicht dir nicht mehr? Du magst Kriminalgeschichten? Hier kommt ein ganz neues Podcast Genre: SPONTANE VERBRECHEN ist UnTrue Crime! Und der erste und einzige Podcast seiner Art. Alles ist zu 100% wahr... bis auf den Teil, den sich Stephan Ziron und Martin Papke spontan improvisiert ausdenken. Nichts...
2025-02-2352 min
The Crone of Temple, TexasGender Roles and SexualityAre women as valued as men in churches?
Many people apparently think that calling women guys doesn’t matter. Some of the people to whom I say “I’m not a guy” insist that “guys” applies to everyone. That’s the same claim that we heard in the church and elsewhere for years, about using only masculine pronouns to refer to everyone from God all the way down. That claim has come—and unfortunately still comes—not just from many men but also from some women, and it’s wrong.
Using masculine pronouns for groups that include both me...
2022-07-0736 min
The Crone of Temple, TexasRequirements to be a ChristianWhat makes someone a Christian?
A Connections reader wrote me some time ago, “not all people who are in church are Christians.” That may well be true, but what does identify a person as a Christian, if it’s not merely being in the church?
For about the first forty years of my life, I assumed being a Christian mainly meant being in a church. Of course, it also meant being “nice” and “sweet” and polite, I thought, and obeying all laws and authorities and following all rules. It essentially meant doing what most people I knew did.
2022-06-1528 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasGiving Money to GodGiving Money to God
For many Christians, the subject of money is taboo in church. Many don’t want any advice from the church about how to spend their money. They don’t want to hear requests for money, either.
That’s odd, because Jesus apparently spoke often about money, and he didn’t mince any words about how it should be used. The Old Testament prophets did the same. In fact, use of money is one of the subjects addressed most often in the Bible.
Two main kinds of giving
Much of...
2022-06-0135 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasCommunion TechnicalitiesDoes God care about technicalities?
A Connections article I wrote some time ago, about Communion, brought an unusual number of responses. Almost all were enthusiastic. Several readers liked the whole issue so well that they made copies and distributed them to church groups they were in.
In that article, I wrote about my most memorable experiences of Communion on three very different occasions.
The three experiences this reader was referring to were:
Alone at home, one day, immersed in a book written by a kindred spirit whose words had greatly expanded my...
2022-05-1924 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasA Fresh Perspective on CommunionA Fresh Perspective on Communion
Eucharist, Communion, the Lord’s Supper. It has been a central feature of Christian worship—some Christians say the central feature—throughout the church’s history, yet churches differ widely in the importance they give it. Some include it in every worship service, while others observe it much less often.
Christians seem to have widely different feelings about Communion, too. For many Christians, Communion is vital. They get upset if their congregation skips one of its usual Communion times. They want Communion brought to their bedside if they’re too sick to com...
2022-05-0315 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasThree views of Jesus' Life, Death, and ResurrectionDuring the season of Easter, Christians tend to focus mainly on the death and resurrection of Jesus, but historical Jesus scholar Stephen J. Patterson believes that Jesus’s life is what makes his death and resurrection important. In his book Beyond the Passion: Rethinking the Death and Life of Jesus (Fortress, 2004), Patterson explains his view.
“To celebrate his death apart from the cause for which he lived,” Patterson believes, “would be ridiculous and meaningless. Yet that is what we have done for the most part.” Jesus’s earliest followers were profoundly devoted to his way of life, and they use...
2022-04-2023 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasFrom sacred acts of worship to fundamentalism. Where did we go wrong?In an issue of The Christian Century magazine a number of years ago, Quaker author Parker J. Palmer warns about putting too much trust, or at least the wrong kind of trust, in church doctrines and customs. “All of our propositions and practices,” he reminds us, “are earthen vessels. All of them are made by human beings of common clay to hold whatever we think we’ve found in our soul-deep quest for the sacred or in its quest for us.”
“If our containers prove too crimped and cramped to hold the treasure well, if they domesticate the sacred a...
2022-04-0628 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasWhat makes a church a church?Is Jesus the main or only requirement?
What are the two or three elements necessary for a group of people to be the church, and what makes the church distinctive from other community enterprises of goodwill and service? My own answer was that for a group to be a church, it must take Jesus as its model.
Without Jesus as an example and motivation, is a group something other than a church? Even though it may do valuable things for good reasons, such as making people happy or meeting important needs. Do you believe that...
2022-03-2327 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasWe want church membership, but why?Recently, a clergy couple in their late twenties wrote a thought-provoking email to me. They like most of what I have to say in my newsletters, but not my saying that the future of today's churches depended on reaching their age group. ''This is precisely the kind of talk," they pointed out, "that turns us off, along with many others our age, Christians and prospective Christians alike."
"It seems that as churches decline in membership," these younger pastors explained, "the focus of congregations becomes not seeking those who are lost, but getting younger people in the door...
2022-03-0932 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasDoes religion affect health?On this episode, Barbara takes on this significant topic: Does religious involvement or spirituality have an impact on one's physical health? Barbara references a documentary she recently watched, and in this episode, we pick apart some of the claims of the film, and Barbara examines various topics around spirituality and health.
If you’re new to the Crone of Temple, Texas, welcome. This podcast features Barbara Wendland, an 88-year old pioneer of progressive Christianity. For nearly 30 years, Barbara wrote a monthly article challenging the church to examine its outdated beliefs and practices. Today, she is in search of...
2022-02-2234 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasYesterday's Heresy Is Often Today's TruthMore than three centuries ago Galileo made important new discoveries about the laws of motion and their application to the solar system. (He supposedly demonstrated them by dropping a cannonball from the tower of Pisa.) But Galileo was criticized because his findings contradicted what "everyone" believed. The Roman Catholic Church excommunicated him for heresy, and only within the recent past has the Catholic Church finally admitted that Galileo was right. He wasn't a heretic after all.
A dismaying look at the past
Recently a friend and I were talking about our childhood years. Hers were...
2022-02-0734 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasThe Literal and the Metaphorical JesusWhat promotes injustice is our failure to make clear to ourselves and other people the difference between the literal and the metaphorical ways of portraying Jesus. We don’t acknowledge that showing him with light skin and hair and European facial features is unrealistic. In addition, by using mainly one portrayal such as the Sallman portrait and putting it in so many church buildings, we create the false impression that it can be taken literally, as if it were a photograph of the earthly Jesus.
Maybe the only reasonable and honest route is either to use no vi...
2021-12-2121 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasA crucial question that we keep trying to avoidAt Christmas God again asks us, as individuals and as congregations, a crucial question that we keep trying to avoid: is our own comfort or God's will our top priority? Advent is a good time for a new answer.
Christians need to be both conformists and nonconformists. We need to say no to some of the world's ways, and to make clear why we're saying no. But the church can't afford to be so unattractive, unavailable, invisible, or incomprehensible that the world overlooks us or dismisses our beliefs without even considering them seriously. And we can't afford...
2021-12-1528 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasWhy it's easy to miss the point about Jesus at ChristmasA cute baby Jesus isn’t the point of Christmas
At Christmas it’s easy to miss the point about Jesus. When we see him as a cute baby, we may forget what he grew up to be and do. This time of year when churches give special attention to the coming of Jesus is an especially good time to reconsider how Jesus’s teaching and example apply to the world we live in.
Focusing on the baby Jesus can help us remember, instead, if we let it. It can remind us of the great potent...
2021-12-0733 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasWe can't box God in foreverGod often has to wrench us loose from strongly held beliefs and cherished traditions in order to show us more of God. Because God is infinite we can never fully see or describe God, so the need to learn more about God, describe God in new ways, and express our faith in new ways never ends.
We miss God's "new thing" when we try to save all the old things forever.
Read the full article here: https://www.connectionsonline.org/blog/we-cant-box-god-in-forever
2021-12-0143 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasReligion and Justice at Vanderbilt UniversitySeveral years ago, Barbara Wendland made a generous contribution to establish the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Here is the vision statement of the program: “Justice, in many religious traditions, is not an abstract idea but tied to the life of embodied communities. To be just means to restore and to build community at all levels: personal, public, political, and economic. At the Wendland-Cook Religion and Justice program, we believe addressing the relationship between religion and matters of economic and ecological justice is foundational to the flourishing of all people and the planet.”
2021-11-2220 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasIs the church merely a pile of rocks?The church is married to tradition, not to the God they claim. When I examine the huge mound of stones that is the church, I see many different kinds of stones. Many are still usable, but some aren't.
On this episode, Barbara discusses why she believe the church is married to tradition, and why many don't even know what the traditions mean.
2021-11-1641 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasWhy we ignore many sins named in scriptureToday we’re talking about a topic that, to some, might seem to be a close book subject. We’re discussing the topic of homosexuality, specifically homosexuality within the church, Christianity’s perspective on it, and the use of language within the Bible. Barbara will read some excerpts from her February 1996 Connections newsletter - and the reason that’s important is because in the mid 90’s the topic of homosexuality was tearing churches and family’s apart.
From Barbara's Website:
"I seriously doubt that homosexuality is a sin, but what if it is? David and many othe...
2021-11-0255 minThe Crone of Temple, TexasHow to reclaim lost parts of yourselfFifty seemed old to me when I was there. Fifty was the first birthday that made me feel old - over the hill - and that was miserable. Then a friend reminded me of the year of Jubilee described in the Bible. Fifty didn't have to be such a bad time after all, I realized. I began looking at the Bible's description of Jubilee as I would look at a dream or a work of art, expressed in symbolic language.
Reclaiming lost parts of myself
When I looked at "the land" as a w...
2021-10-1936 min
The Crone of Temple, TexasThe Crone of Temple, TexasOver the centuries people have come to think of crones as mean, ugly, old women, like the witches we now see pictured at Halloween. The original meaning, however, was largely positive.
In pre-Christian Europe, Walker observes, older women were in charge of religious rites and official sacrifices. In the Middle East and Egypt, they were doctors, midwives, surgeons, and advisors on health care, child rearing, and sexuality. They also took care of the soul, conducting ceremonies for every event from birth to death. They were the record-keepers, too. They wrote histories, kept vital records, transcribed and e...
2021-10-1127 min
Kvarner i More - Urlaub in Kroatien der PodcastFolge 5 - Bootsausflüge - Die Pasa´#kvarnerimore #kimurlaubpodcast
Hallo in der heutigen Folge nehmen wir Euch mit aufs Wasser und erzählen Euch welche Möglichkeiten an Bootstouren es gibt um die Kvarner Bucht zu erkunden.
Viel Spass beim hören.
Ein Dank geht an Barbara Ilijanic´ vom Piratenboot Pasa´in Selce sowie Zoran Ilijanic´von www.GRAMAR.hr die uns bei den Tonaufnahmen für diese Folge tatkräftig unterstützt haben.
Ein Dank an das Team Uschi, Sabine und Kevin vom Reisebüro Europa in Bedburg/Erft die uns bei der Planung unserer Reisen unterstützen.
...
2020-10-1707 min
Front RowHastening Change in the Church, with Barbara WendlandIn this episode of Faith And Reason 360 we are honored to welcome author, scholar, and scribe of the popular monthly newsletter “Connections” Barbara Wendland. Join us as Barbara discusses the need for a radical update of creed, attitude, and structure in the Christian church, whose practices, Wendland says, are outdated—and this behind-the-times attitude, though revered as traditional by many, comes at the expense of Church success. The world has changed dramatically since the 3rd century; is the Church ready to catch up?
2018-03-2950 min