So, Paul Young has a new book out so he’s on this podcast. ] You may remember “The Shack”, huge seller, with a funky updated theology. I’ll give the guy credit for creativity and the story of dealing with grief is actually pretty good. I just wish he didn’t talk about the theology part of it as if was real. It’s a long podcast, so I skipped a lot. At about 57 minutes he says something about “faith traditions” having these wonderful ideas about hope and love, but “religions” take that and make it male dominated and exclusive and all that bad stuff. They try to hash that out for the next 10 minutes, but I don’t think they get any further than Young saying that he just likes the idea of Jesus better. Jim (the podcaster), brings up something from a guy named Capon, who says, the meaning of the cross is that religion is done, it never worked and never will. I’ve thought that, but rarely hear it expressed so plainly.
If you’re interested, tell me if I missed anything.
After the interview, he chats with his fellow podcaster, who is a very liberal preacher. He says he really didn’t like the way Young said saying evolution is how we came to be who are is “too easy”. He says, the easy thing is making up a reason for the meaningless of the universe. If your imagination can fill in that absurdity, that’s the easy thing. Facing the meaningless is what is hard.
Kinda interesting was the preacher’s response, he said it was a good first conversation and they hadn’t plumbed each other’s depths enough to understand where the other was coming from. The whole two and half hours has that kind of stuff, instead of basking in the difference, they look to what might come of further investigation.