Jacob Warren Barczi

On Saturday morning, July 19, at 8:30am, Jacob Warren (aka Frogger) Barczi was born at Cambridge Hospital.  He weighed in at 8 pounds, 9.4 ounces and was 20.5 inches long.  He has a full head of hair, is a natural-born eater, and, in my humble opinion, is in all other ways simply perfect.  He’s amazingly strong for a two-day old - already picking his head up, pushing off your chest with his hands and legs.  Leann and I may be able to outrun him for much less time than we planned.

We’re home now, and enjoying getting to know one another and figuring out what to do next (where next is generally defined on a time horizon of about thirty seconds).  We continue to be in awe and appropriately terrified, as we were when we found out he was coming and as we’ve resigned ourselves to being for as long as God has given him to us.

More to come on the little guy - for now, here are some pictures.

(First, the last one of Leann before Frogger made his appearance):

(Jacob getting his first salon treatment…)

(As I said, exceptionally strong - and already resorting to fisticuffs!!)

Tenth Sunday* after Pentecost

‘Loneliness has little to do with what we do or where we do it… Loneliness has to do with the sudden clefts we experience in every human relation, the gaps that open up with such stomach-turning unexpectedness. In a brief moment, I and my brother or sister have moved away into different worlds, and there is no language we can share…. It is in the middle of intimacy that the reality of loneliness most dramatically appears.’


-Rowan Williams




‘I’m a stranger here and no one sees me -
Except you.’


-Bob Dylan




‘…then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.’


- I Corinthians 13

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*Sunday Quotes delayed this week due to the unannounced arrival of a very small and demanding person who, to all appearances, intends to camp out in our apartment for something like eighteen years. More on that in the next post.

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

‘The human dimensions of the Old Testament are to be duly appreciated, but it is supremely important that we understand in faith the Old Testament’s claim that God is its primary author. If we do, we will see the Old Testament as more than an anthology of various types of literature produced by a series of author across a span of centuries. We will understand that it all issued ultimately from the throne room of Israel’s heavenly King and that all its literary forms possess a functional unity as instruments of Yahweh’s ongoing covenantal oversight of the conduct and faith of his vassal people.’


- Meredith Kline




‘Scripture … is God speaking to man. It means a word that is not past but present, because eternal, a word spoken to me personally and not simply to others.’


- Hans Urs von Balthasar




‘”Our God comes, he does not keep silence” (Psalm 50,3). … God can only be God for us because God is not silent. A speechless God is not God in the sense of the Bible.’


- Wolf Krötke

Eighth Sunday after Pentecost

‘Man was born free, but is everywhere in bondage.’

- Jean Jacques Rousseau

‘Humankind was created for communion, but is everywhere divided.’

- William T. Cavanaugh

‘For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility… For through him we both have access in one Spirit to the Father.’

- Ephesians 2

A Confession for the semantic web set

Currently we’re working on putting together a series of documents for our church website which will explain who we are and what we believe. Since we’ve only got a first draft ready I’m not going to post or link to the text yet - except as the following:

I generated that tag cloud version of our explanation of the gospel and its centrality to the life of our church with a nifty little tool called wordle, which I ran across in this post on the First Things blog.  The size of the words gives a nice graphical depiction of how frequently they’re used.  On the whole, I’d say this is encouraging - nice to see words like ‘gospel’, ‘God’, ‘love’, ‘understand’, ’sins’, ‘Jesus’, and ‘church’ standing out.  On the other hand, the fact that ‘etc.’ is apparently showing up as often as ‘Christ’ suggests that the prose could stand to be tightened up just a tad.

You might think that this would be a good way of checking whether or not a given piece of text (such as a sermon, as the First Things post suggested) is sufficiently clear, at least in terms of emphasis.  One of our elders (whose work involves machine recognition of language) was quick to point out, however, that we’re terribly far from having any algorithm capable of extracting meaning from language with the facility of a typical human (and we may never have one, at least according to this guy).  And indeed, our discussion of the draft last night centered almost entirely on making it clearer - as it stands it assumes more familiarity with Christianity, and in particularly reformed theology, than would be appropriate for the general audience (we hope) is visiting our website.

On the other hand, nearly everyone visiting any website is probably familiar with tag clouds - perhaps posting that version of our statement would be clearest of all…

Rogers Installation

Logan has posted a brief summary of the service we held at CtK Dorchester to install Dan Rogers as pastor of our congregation there.  As my buddy Jack would say - it was pretty all right.

Praise God; God have mercy.  Please pray for Dorchester.

Update: Now he’s posted photos.

William T. Cavanaugh on globalization vs. catholicity

When I attended Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City some years ago, we would periodically recite together the Nicene Creed as part of our worship service.  Appended to the statement, ‘I believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church,’ was always a helpful footnote explaining that catholic - with a small c - refers to the church universal across space and time, as opposed to the Roman Catholic church in particular.  William T. Cavanaugh explains,

The Greek adjective katholikos - derived from kath’ holou, ‘on the whole’ - in antiquity was commonly used as an equivalent of ‘universal’ or ‘general’. … Although we continue to use the word ‘catholic’ in English as an equivalent of universal, as Henri de Lubac points out, the terms in some senses diverge.  ‘Universal’ suggests spreading out; ‘catholic’ suggests gathering together.  In modern English ‘universal’ indicates a reality prevalent everywhere.  According to de Lubac ‘”Catholic” says something more and different: it suggests the idea of an organic whole, of a cohesion, of a firm synthesis, of a reality which is not scattered but, on the contrary, turned toward a center which assures its unity, whatever the expanse in area or the internal differentiation may be.’[1]
-  William T. Cavanaugh, Theopolitical Imagination, T&T Clark, 2002, p. 113

In the same essay, titled ‘The Myth of Globalization as Catholicity,’ Cavanaugh delves more deeply into the differences between the notions of universality and catholicity, focusing in particular on the phenomenon of globalization as emblematic of the former and contrasted against the Church’s participation in the Lord’s Supper as representative of the latter.  For Cavanaugh, the sacrament functions as a means of telling, within the Church and before the watching world, an alternative story of time and space.  In this story, differences are not merely leveled out, reducing diverse humans to interchangeable parts of an homogeneous whole.  Instead, he argues, the sacrament conveys the reality that all members belong to one Body, which even in diaspora is not scattered but exists in its entirety in every local celebration of the Supper, for ‘where two or three are gathered,’ the Head of the Body is fully present.  The social implications of this story stand in stark contrast to those of the global market:

‘Practicing the narrative of the body of Christ collapses spatial barriers, but in a way very different from globalizing capitalism.  Globalization depends on a mapping that juxtaposes people from all over the world in the same space-time.  This juxtaposition situates diverse localities in competition with one another.  At the same time, the illusion is fostered that the world’s people are contemporaries, different from each other, but merely different.  In Eucharistic space, by contrast, we are not juxtaposed but identified.  In the body of Christ, as Paul says, ‘If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it’ (1 Cor. 12.26).  This radical collapse of spatial barriers accomplishes not competition, but says Paul, greater honour and care for the weakest member, who is identified with oneself.  At the same time the other is not merely different but wholly other, for the suffering are identified with Christ himself (Col. 1.24), who nevertheless remains other to the Church.’ - ibid., pp. 120-121

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[1] Henri de Lubac, The Motherhood of the Church, trans. Sr Sergia Englund (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1982), p. 174.

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

‘The prospects of reviving belief in a moral law are dim… [Morality] may survive in a more defensible form when seen to be a human creation. We can shape it consciously to serve people’s needs and interests, and to reflect the things we most care about.’


- Jonathan Glover




‘They are rid of the Christian God, and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to the Christian morality… When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet.’


- Friedrich Nietzsche

Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

‘I am a poor freezingly cold soul
So far from where
I intended to go
Scavenging through life’s very constant lulls
So far from where I’m determined to go

‘Wish I knew the way to reach the one I love
There is no way …
Wish I had the charm to attract the one I love
But you see, I’ve got no charm’

- Morrissey, “Seasick, Yet Still Docked”

‘It is not good for man to be alone. Hitherto all things [in Genesis] that have been named, were approved of God to be very good: loneliness is the first thing which God’s eye named not good.’

- John Milton

CTK Dorchester

On Sunday, June 29, CTK will install Dan Rogers as pastor of our congregation in Dorchester, Mass. A small but faithful contingent has been worshiping there for a year and a half, praying for their neighbors in one of Boston’s more impoverished and violent regions.

Some quick facts about Dorchester (which I copied from our ‘Pray for the Dot’ website, linked below):

• 280,000 souls reside in Dot

• 65% of the population is African-American, Hispanic, Asian or multi-racial

• 39% of people in Dot hold Bachelor’s degrees. Dot is home of UMass-Boston

• MA was a haven for Unitarianism and the birthplace of Transcendentalism, and it has more members of the Universalist Unitarian church than any other state

• Dot’s slogan, “Boston’s largest and most diverse neighborhood”

• Deeply concerned about civic issues

• Very “religious”, but only 5% of the population place their faith in Christ alone

• 260 colleges/universities in the New England region

• “Settled” neighborhoods have been home to the same families for generations

We are thrilled to welcome Dan, his wife Michelle, and their five children as they take on this crucial role in seeking the welfare of the city in the advance of God’s kingdom.

We are also excited to have Logan Keck working with us in Dorchester as a church planting intern. Logan and his wife Melissa have recently graduated from Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary, and quickly moved to Dorchester to work with us there. We are very much looking forward for seeing how God will work in and through them in the coming years.

CTK Dorchester is on the web here and here. Dan has been writing a blog here, and Logan and Melissa have one here (their blog has a lot of great information about Dorchester and the church there). I believe Logan also set up the ‘Pray for the Dot’ site - great job, Logan!