Pastor Foltz is Pastor Emeritus of Saint James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg, PA and author of the the Frontline Study content.
In my denomination, we pretty much just celebrate on Easter Sunday. We read about the empty tomb, loudly proclaim, “He is Risen” to each other, and do a lot of singing. We wait until the following Sundays to reflect on what all this means. Then we take time to ponder Jesus’ appearances among his first […]
After much discussion, I have decided to give in and admit talking about the common story of Christianity is not helpful. As many of you have pointed out, there are just too many incredibly divergent claims out there. Instead, I shall speak about the book’s understanding of what the Christian voice should be in the […]
Last week I wrote that a proper understanding of faith, hope, and love provides a common story for the Church by acknowledging our real life connections to community, nature, time, and place. I quickly got a marvelous critique from Lupe that raised three challenging questions about the relevance of my thoughts. The first two stem […]
The last two chapters in the book examine further how technique has damaged culture by removing things from their real-life contexts, how faith, hope, and love correct that for the Church, and how this enables the Church to offer much needed guidance to culture. In one of my face-to-face classes, I suggested that the customs, […]
The Gospel of John changes the love command from “love your neighbor as you love yourself” to “love your friends as Jesus loved you.” When John has Jesus put it this way at the Last Supper, he immediately makes the Passion the best expression of Christian love. All of the many atonement theories that attempt […]
At the end of his encyclical Laudato Si, Pope Francis suggested we use a spiritual rather than a technological paradigm in working with the environment. One thesis of our book is we do well to do the same in all personal relationships. I think of a paradigm as the theoretical perspective or framework we use to […]
Last week, I examined the basic Christian message or Gospel that proceeds from the statement “God is love.” Perhaps trying to be too clever, I suggested everything else is commentary. My intention was simply to make clear that this message is always changing as it is applied to the particulars of the situation being addressed. […]
When I first tried to summarize the chapter on love last week, I wrote, “The seventh chapter of the book maintains that Christianity is all about love overcoming the violence of this world and that everything else is commentary.” I stewed about that for some time and finally changed “love” to “God’s love.” It better […]
The seventh chapter of Faith, Hope, and Love in the Technological Society maintains that Christianity is all about God’s love overcoming the violence of this world and that everything else is commentary. It also asserts we are already in a place in Paul Wildman’s description of the techno-utopian-drift where our dependence on technology has severely […]
Franz and I intentionally used the term “vision of the future” for hope’s promise. Nonetheless, my discussion groups frequently characterized it as utopian. An online conversation with Paul about what he calls techno-utopian-drift, or TUD, convinced me to examine further society’s growing dependence on technology. Both of us believe it is important that society makes […]
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