Faith or Moralism?
Is your spiritual life based on genuine faith in God, or are you coasting on believing you’re a good person?
By Chris Queen
I’m going through the book of Romans with a friend of mine, and the first two chapters offer an interesting contrast. The second half of the first chapter talks about people who wallow in their sins and deny their need for repentance and salvation – and God – while chapter two talks about how religious people need the Gospel too.
The first half of the chapter warns against judging others. This isn’t in the sense that the world claims – that we don’t have the right to call out sin. It’s judgment in the sense of looking down on others whom we don’t perceive as being as “good” as we think we are. It’s an easy human tendency, and not just in religious and moral circles, to give the side-eye to people we deem as less worthy of love and attention as we think we are.
The Author’s Dilemma: Introducing Morality Into the Writing
By Andrea Widburg
One of my cheap thrills is watching the CW show Supernatural. The interaction between brothers Sam and Dean Winchester and their friends, whether angel, demon, witch, or even human, along with imaginative and sometimes incredibly funny plots, has made it an engaging viewing experience.
In addition to the standard horror show and comedy shticks, the long-running show occasionally grapples with moral issues, in no small part because most episodes have the brothers and their friends killing “ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties and things that go bump in the night.” Usually the monsters are presented as appropriately evil, but there have been times when these evil monsters have been trying to reform — and the brothers sometimes offed them anyway. Fun stuff, as I said…
