I Can’t Make This Up

I was once going to write a book called “I Don’t Have to Make This Shit Up.” And I often say that when reading the newspaper. It’s getting to the point where fiction will have to traverse into the mundane, because all the crazy, nutzo stories are true.

13 January 2008

While looking for a link to the scripture that went with the sermon today, I googled “Colossians 2: 16-23” and the third link that came up was entitled, “The Things That Can Ruin Your Faith,” which sounded suspiciously like “Some Errors That Will Ruin Your Faith,” so I followed it. Ray C. Stedman’s sermon “The Things That Can Ruin Your Faith” from 1987 is pretty close to the sermon preached this morning, sans some of the anachronistic persons and fads, like Oral Roberts. I have no idea what to do with this information, but it initially interrupted the flow of my blog entry, so I moved it there. There are lots of places sermons come from–there’s whole books of sermon outlines available to pastors. But I’m not sure what to do with one that’s not been placed on the internet with that intention.

Preaching and Plagiarism is apparently a pretty contested idea, as we see in Steve Mathewson’s “In Praise of Plagiarism?,”
discussed here on NPR with Rev. Claudia A. Highbaugh, chaplain and lecturer at Harvard Divinity School in 2002, Terry Mattingly’s “Plagiarism and the Pulpit“includes the story of A.J. Gordon, an American preacher visiting a church in England, only to hear one of his own sermons preached from the pulpit–circa 1876. Scott Hoezee, at the Center for Excellence in Preaching, talks about how to give verbal footnotes and give credit to the debt of using other people’s materials.

The very best article on the topic I’ve found is “Stolen Goods: Tempted to Plagiarize“, a piece by Thomas G. Long, professor of preaching at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.

13 January 2008

While searching for an example of the kind of communion wafer I’m not familiar with, I came across this “Celebration Cup“, about which I can only say,–I think this is very, very, very wrong.

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