Intermodular Interfaith, Part 2

I mentioned Interfaith Caring Ministries the other day when I published this post.

This particular donation was very small,
but it's the principle of the thing. 

These ICM offices are located about 1.5 miles from Centerpointe on Park Street just south of FM 518, between those quaintly-designed retail shops and the baseball fields near the intersection of Dickinson Road. 

ICM was also profiled recently in Galveston County Daily News, and partly because most of that content is behind the paywall, I wanted to share a particularly insightful piece of perspective which is worth celebrating:


Thank God somebody had the guts to say it,
and say it bluntly. 

Screengrabbed from this GCDN article. 

This is a timely observation in my family's personal evolution, because our teenager is at the stage of life where she is interested in exploring different churches.  So lately we've been conducting our own mini-tour of sorts, as part of her religious education (notice I used the word "education", which is not the same as "indoctrination"). 

The sheer breadth and depth of the ego-centric ignorance we've encountered on our tour is remarkable.  We've found bubbling cauldrons of aspiring denominational triumphalism with all of its deleterious hallmark signs (as reproduced below from this Wikipedia article):

• Impaired ability to judge the value or morality of the group's actions;
• Cessation of creativity and innovation within the group;
• Blindness to other groups’ strengths and innovations;
• A tendency to over-reach against the group’s competitors, based on an inflated sense of the likelihood of triumph in conflict.

Particularly with respect to some of the hard-right evangelicals, apparently they never got that memo about God not being able to be for and against the same thing at the same time, because they seem to think they have exclusive claim on God's true favor, to the extent of explicitly condemning other groups in their entirety, all while obviously not having a clue beyond stereotype as to what those other groups really stand for. 

If I hadn't sat in some local Sunday services and heard it with my own ears, I would never have believed that this kind of crap still goes on behind closed church doors.  But it does, and it's discouraging, which is why I was extra-extra-appreciative of the article that Rick Cousins recently penned for GCDN. 

Screengrabbed from this GCDN article. 

Kudos to ICM for being a local beacon of sanity in an otherwise unworkably-polarized society, and for predicating their service model on deeper shared principles rather than superficial religious branding differences.  Henceforth, any additional "donations" I receive via this blog will be going directly to ICM, even if they come from Toyota.