Affection for Truth

The Writings teach that truth on its own is not enough. This week Joel uses a few passages from the Bible as well as other ideas from the Writings to look at why we need more than truth to have a complete perspective. -Editor.

Give therefore your servant an understanding heart to judge your people, that I may discern between good and evil: for who is able to judge this great people of yours? (1 Kings 3:9)

Affection for truth makes the church. What is affection for truth? It is loving the truth for its own sake and also because it leads to the good of life. As children we are born with the potential to be truly human, to be wise and loving, but in order to become so it is a long, even a lifetime process. The first step is education: we need to learn knowledge and truth. This is why children are so receptive to soaking up new information like sponges. When we become teenagers we need to develop the rational mind, Ishmael. This first rational is harsh, untempered, but another step along the journey.

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The New Church, Money, and a World Full of Endless Need Part 2

Where have we come from and where are we going? Last week Joel looked back at some of the history of Bryn Athyn and the General Church of the New Jerusalem. Today he looks to the future—to what he sees we can do moving forward. -Editor.

Part 2: Where the World is and What It Needs

So if the money has allowed Bryn Athyn to become what it is today, what is up with the rest of the world? The short answer, from what I can tell, is vastation as far as the eye can see. Vastation is the dying of the old to make way for the new. In the long term, it is actually a beautiful process. In the short term, it is always very painful. In this sense, it is exactly the same whether we talk about the collective states that society and churches go through, or the individual states that we go through in our own lives. When we are going through a temptation, vastation, or spiritual trial it is brutal. And the Writings tell us that these spiritual processes must run their course, even to despair. It is only later, looking back, when we can clearly see that old lower things in us needed to die in order that new higher things in us could be born. So in the big picture of the long term the world is also moving toward heat and light, love and enlightenment. But it cannot get there without going through pain and shadows.

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The New Church, Money, and a World Full of Endless Need Part 1

Sometimes we can learn how to move forward by looking back at where we've come from. Joel looks back at the history of the General Church of the New Jerusalem and its founding families in Bryn Athyn, PA. By looking at the origins of the organization Joel looks to the future, proposing some ideas about how to keep things moving forward. -Editor.

Part 1: Where We Are and How We Got Here

Let’s talk about something that people don’t seem to like to talk about, at least not in public – the New Church and money. The tradition I grew up in, the General Church of the New Jerusalem and the town of Bryn Athyn, is, by any objective measure, quite wealthy. The history is quite telling. Bryn Athyn, the General Church, and the Academy were founded as a utopian town, church, and school system at the end of the 19th century thanks to the largesse and generosity of John Pitcairn. For a long time the Pitcairn family continued to exert a large degree of control over the town and church in a sort of benevolent feudal way. These were of course different times, times when class was more distinct in an America still living in Old World shadows -- time when noble minded patricians were expected to bridge the gap between rich and poor, between the aristocrats and the laboring classes, by acts of civic minded giving. So while the so called “robber barons” made enormous fortunes off the backs of immigrant labor, special access to land and resources, and elite clubby connections -- men like Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Hearst, and Pitcairn -- they also built parks, endowed schools, and funded all kinds of public projects.

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“Things fall apart”: Vastation, Profanation, and New Life

Everything has a cycle: new, growing, old, and dying. The seasons, the plants, and people. What about churches? What would that look like and what would that mean? Does it matter? This week Joel discusses these thought provoking questions. -Editor.

What is wrong with the world today? This is a question that people ask in every age because we live in an imperfect world. There are always challenges, natural and spiritual, which we face while we are living here. But in some ages the questions become more pressing, and even more particular. During wars and revolutions people wonder where all the hate comes from and what we are fighting over. What is worth dying for? During famines and natural disasters people wonder about how they will survive and why these tragedies bring out both the best and the worst in people. During the Vietnam War, the Great Depression, World War I, the French Revolution, and the Black Death, to name a few dire eras, people could no longer simply distract themselves with natural life, all that “getting and spending,” worldly pleasures and worldly joys. Something far more important comes to the surface in times of trial: existential questions, questions of basic meaning, questions, ultimately of life and death. And though we all wrestle with these deeper issues at times of personal tragedy, the death of a loved one, an illness, the loss of a job, it is during these collective times of tumult that the world itself seems to stop and ask collectively some very biblical questions: “How long O Lord will we suffer?” or “My God My God why have you forsaken me?” It is true that some people don’t frame the questions in biblical or theological language. But whether you address these questions to God or the universe or some wise old man, the deepest questions in life are all the same. Why this suffering? When will it end? What does it mean to be human?

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