[Welcome! If this is your first visit to On Faith and Life, note that entries appear on the page with the most recent at the top. Scroll down to our inagural entry, “Trinity 2.0,” for a primer on what this blog is all about.]

The season of Advent begins this Sunday, November 30. As you may know, Trinity Presbyterian Church has participated for at least several years in a movement known as “Reclaiming Christmas,” which asks the pertinent question, “Whose birthday is it anyway?” (You can read more about it on page 9 of December’s Tidings newsletter.)

A similar movement that I’ve recently become aware of is Advent Conspiracy; the concept behind Advent Conspiracy—the “conspiracy,” by the way, is one against Christmas consumerism—is in four parts:

• Worship fully
• Spend less
• Give more
• Love all

Advent Conspiracy has created an promotional video that summarizes the essence of the movement; you can view that video here:

Advent Conspiracy

May your Advent season be blessed, but not too comfortable. Remember, as Jesus says in the Lectionary gospel passage for the first Sunday of Advent, “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time will come” (Mark 13.33).

—Dwight Christenbury

[Welcome! If this is your first visit to On Faith and Life, note that entries appear on the page with the most recent at the top. Scroll down to our inagural entry, “Trinity 2.0,” for a primer on what this blog is all about.]

There are a couple of interesting pieces about Thanksgiving on the op/ed page of today’s New York Times. The first, “Where the Wild Things Were,” by Andrew Beahrs, examines the likely Thanksgiving menu from the 1621 celebration at Plymouth, Massachusetts, as well as a menu crafted by Mark Twain in the late nineteenth century, and traces how our “traditional” Thanksgiving meal has changed over the past four centuries. How do deer, ducks and geese, gooseberries, wild plums, lobsters, and “eels ‘trod’ from the nearby salt marsh” strike you?

The piece, which documents the disappearance of wild food from our dinner tables, ends with a sobering look at part of the reason why:

“The Pilgrims appreciated wild foods for their contribution to survival; Twain, for their taste and their hold on his memory. All saw the foods as fundamental to the America they knew. None would have imagined that many would one day be seen as curiosities.

“But with the exception of fish, today it is vanishingly rare to find wild foods in our marketplaces. The 10 million prairie hens in the Illinois of Twain’s day have diminished to a mere 300 birds; his terrapin struggle to survive amid wounded Eastern wetlands; his titanic Lahontan cutthroat ‘lake trout, from Tahoe’ were killed off by over-fishing and the introduction of invasive species. Tasting some of Twain’s wild things is impossible or illegal, with more limited to dedicated hunters and fishermen.

“Preserving or restoring the wild foods that remain begins with appreciating what they have to offer—extraordinary taste and smell, certainly, but also the joy of experiencing the marshes and mountains and lakes these plants and birds and animals rely upon. We have a great deal to learn from Twain’s instinctive premise: that losing a wild food means losing part of the landscape of our lives.”

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The second piece, “A French Connection,” by Kenneth C. Davis, reminds us of a little-known early New World Thanksgiving that preceded the Pilgrims of Plymouth by fifty years. A French Huguenot community, fleeing religious persecution in Europe, settled near present-day Jacksonville, Florida, in 1564, and Davis tells us that they held a service of “thanksgiving” as soon as they landed.

Sadly, these early settlers were massacred just a year later by the Spanish. The Spanish admiral who oversaw the operation hanged a number of the victims beneath a sign reading, “I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics”—and a long early American tradition of stamping out religious dissent had begun:

“Starting with those massacred French pilgrims, the saga of the nation’s birth and growth is often a bloodstained one, filled with religious animosities. In Boston, for instance, the Puritan fathers banned Catholic priests and executed several Quakers between 1659 and 1661. Cotton Mather, the famed Puritan cleric, led the war cries against New England’s Abenaki ‘savages’ who had learned their prayers from the French Jesuits. The colony of Georgia was established in 1732 as a buffer between the Protestant English colonies and the Spanish missions of Florida; its original charter banned Catholics. The bitter rivalry between Catholic France and Protestant England carried on for most of a century, giving rise to anti-Catholic laws, while a mistrust of Canada’s French Catholics helped fire many patriots’ passion for independence. As late as 1844, Philadelphia’s anti-Catholic ‘Bible Riots’ took the lives of more than a dozen people.

“The list goes on. Our history is littered with bleak tableaus that show what happens when righteous certitude is mixed with fearful ignorance. . . .”

As we celebrate Thanksgiving, grateful for the blessings of family, community, and nation, let’s also remember where we’ve come from and use what we’ve learned to work toward a world in which religious violence everywhere might begin to seem as strange and distant as it does here.

—Dwight Christenbury

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,

the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep,

while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. . . .

Genesis 1.1-2

First, some definitions . . .

blog noun : a Web site on which an individual or group of users produces an ongoing narrative; verb (blogged, blogging) : add new material to or regularly update a blog (ORIGIN: a shortening of weblog)

web•log noun : another term for blog (ORIGIN 1990s: from web in the sense [World Wide Web] and log in the sense [regular record of incidents])

FAQ noun : a text file containing a list of questions and answers relating to a particular subject, esp. one giving basic information for users of an Internet newsgroup; pl. FAQs (ORIGIN 1990s: acronym from frequently asked questions)

So now that we’ve dispensed with the definitions, on to the FAQs . . .

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“What is this?” The blog you’re reading, On Faith and Life, is Trinity Presbyterian Church’s new vehicle for sharing and discussing reflections, thoughts, and ideas of a theological nature (and for a theology geek like me, that means reflections, thoughts, and ideas on just about anything!) and perhaps even for building community in a new way. Words have always been the “currency” of the church, from the Scripture readings, sermons, prayers, and hymns of worship services to the articles, calendar listings, and (sometimes) editorials of church newsletters to the reflections and meditations found in devotional pamphlets. The currency of this blog, too, is words—they just happen to be words on a screen. And, more importantly, they are words that invite your response—for more on that, keep reading.

“Can you be a little more specific?” In no particular order, here are some of the things you might find in On Faith and Life:

• News about and reflections on events in the life of the church—both here at Trinity and in the church at large, most often the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
• Reflections on local, national, and world events
• Meditations and devotions (maybe even poetry)
• Discussions of particular biblical or theological topics

And here are some of the things we expect that you’ll never find in On Faith and Life:

• Screeds advancing a writer’s pet agenda—worthy as it might be
• Reviews of last Sunday’s sermon
• Personal attacks on any individual or group or viewpoint
• Anonymous posts (the writer will always sign his or her name at the end of each post)

Is it possible that something inappropriate for On Faith and Life might slip through the cracks? Absolutely—we’re only human. So please e-mail me (Dwight) if you find something that you feel doesn’t belong.

“Who’s writing this blog?” The ministers of Trinity—Mark Stanley, Joe Gernoske, and Dwight Christenbury—will be the most frequent and regular contributors. From time to time, we’ll invite guest bloggers to contribute; if you have a topic in mind or an idea for a post, please e-mail me (dc.trinity [at] mac.com). And appropriate comments are always welcome; there’s a place to leave comments at the bottom of each post.

“Is anyone else in the larger church doing this sort of thing?” Strangely enough, yes—turns out the church is more cutting-edge than you might think. One of the most prominent Presbyterian bloggers these days is our current Moderator, Bruce Reyes-Chow, but Bruce is hardly alone. For some of the other Presbyterian and church-related blogs, see the list of links (“Blogroll”) on the left side of this page.

“How can I contribute?” If you have a topic in mind or an idea for a post, please e-mail me (dc.trinity [at] mac.com). And appropriate comments are always welcome; there’s a place to leave comments at the bottom of each post. (But remember: all comments, once approved and posted, are visible to anyone reading the blog.)

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Finally, as good Presbyterians, it’s appropriate that we end this inaugural post with a quotation from our brother John Calvin that captures a bit of the searching spirit of On Faith and Life:

“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern” (Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.1.1).

Thanks for reading—stick with us, and join us on the journey!

—Dwight Christenbury