Pub Theology 12/3/24 -- Stuff, stuff, and more stuff

Peter Trumbore • December 2, 2024

'Tis the season of stuff. Last week was Thanksgiving, and many of us gathered with family or friends to stuff ourselves with a holiday feast. But right on the heels of that came Black Friday, then Small Business Saturday, and now Cyber Monday, when we were encouraged to stuff our shopping carts, both physical and virtual, with even more stuff. Stuff for ourselves, stuff for others, stuff for the sake of stuff.


If you want to take a deeper dive, check out the short, 20-minute film called "The Story of Stuff." The whole thing is interesting, but a central part of the argument is that the pattern of consumption that generates all our stuff is the product of a modern economic system that has only been in place since the 1950s. Between the twin forces of planned obsolescence and the more powerful perceived obsolescence, we are driven to acquire (and then just as quickly discard) more and more and more stuff. And the negative impacts of all of this, on the environment in particular, are largely kept hidden from us.


So let's talk about our relationship with stuff. Are you a minimalist when it comes to stuff, or do like your stuff and plenty of it? What do you think is behind your attitude toward the stuff in your life? Do you ever think about the impact of the stuff you acquire, especially on the environment? But what about its impact on our daily lives? One of the arguments of the film is that our need to acquire more and more stuff forces us to work longer, and harder, to afford the things we want, but at the expense of things that can really make us happy, like spending time in nature, or making connection with others, or having experiences, or just sitting peacefully by ourselves. Do you find this to be true for yourself? Does the pursuit of stuff get in the way of more important things for you? What do you think you can do about that?


Join us for the conversation this Tuesday, Dec. 3, starting at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford. We've got stuff to talk about.

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By Andrew Guffey • June 15, 2025
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our service is at 9:30 a.m.. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream.

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By Andrew Guffey • June 8, 2025
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service. 

Pub Theology -- Summer hiatus

By Peter Trumbore • June 3, 2025
Well, we've come to that time of year again. Now that June is here, your hard-working team here at PubTheo is taking a break from the rigors of figuring out what to talk about week after week. So we will be on our annual summer break until we start back up again in September. We'll see you on the cusp of fall. In the meantime, some of us are going to go fishing.

Pub Theology 5/27/25 -- High on faith

By Peter Trumbore • May 27, 2025
Some seven years back, researchers at NYU and Johns Hopkins University launched a study in which they enlisted some two dozen religious leaders from a variety of traditions -- priests, pastors, rabbis, Zen Buddhist monks, Islamic prayer leaders -- to take part in a research project exploring psychedelics and sacred experience. The experiment was intended to assess whether a transcendental experience makes the leaders more effective and confident in their work and how it alters their religious thinking. You can read about the setup of the study in this article from The Guardian . It turns out that the study produced some really interesting results. A story published a few weeks ago in The New Yorker tells the tale. Unfortunately that article is locked behind a paywall, but the author, Michael Pollan (who has written extensively about the use of psychedelics and their effects), however, summarized some of what the study found in this interview . Pollan writes that the participants described their regarded their mushroom-induced trips as authentic mystical experiences, not just a drug experience. For some, the experience was truly transformative. One of the surprising findings that Pollan remarked upon was that "their experiences were not always consistent with the imagery or symbolism of their own faiths. One Christian theologian said God was like a Jewish mother. In fact, most of the people I interviewed felt that the divine they encountered was feminine. That blew their minds; and it blew mine, too. ... Just about everybody had an encounter with the divine, and for the most part it was a feminine, nurturing, sweet presence. We have such a patriarchal understanding of religion, and most stereotypes of God are gendered masculine. So I think it’s ironic, and somewhat humorous, that under the influence of psychedelics God turns out to be more female than male." Nearly all of the participants rated their first experience with psilocybin as among the top five most spiritually significant events of their lives. Among participants who had two sessions, the researchers found that a striking number—seventy-nine per cent—reported that the experience had enriched their prayer, their effectiveness in their vocation, and their sense of the sacred in daily life. It turns out that there is a long history of people trying to trace a connection between the early Christian church's eucharistic practice and psychedelic substances, though scholars have their doubts. This article from The Christian Century goes into some of that fascinating story. For our conversation this evening, we're going to talk about psychedelics and spirituality. Do you have experience with this? If so, what was your experience like? If not, would you try it? Do you feel that a spiritual experience augmented by substances is more or less valid than other spiritual experiences? The discussion starts at 7pm tonight, May 27, at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.

Sixth Sunday of Easter | May 25, 2025

By Andrew Guffey • May 25, 2025
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service. 

Fifth Sunday of Easter | May 18, 2025

By Andrew Guffey • May 18, 2025
This Sunday, all are welcome to join us for a morning of worship and fellowship. Whether you are with us in the sanctuary or joining from afar, your presence strengthens our community. Our services are at 8:30 & 10:00 a.m. We warmly welcome those who cannot attend in person to join us via our live stream for the 10:00 a.m. service. 

Pub Theology 5/13/25 -- That's the wrong question

By Peter Trumbore • May 12, 2025
Way back in January 1959, C.S. Lewis published an article in The Atlantic Monthly in which the author and Christian apologist explores the question of the efficacy of prayer. In short, Does prayer work? But Lewis, ever one to make us want to think, says that's the wrong question, as understandable a question as it might be. "For up till now we have been tackling the whole question in the wrong way and on the wrong level. The very question “Does prayer work?” puts us in the wrong frame of mind from the outset. “Work”: as if it were magic, or a machine — something that functions automatically." This isn't to say that petitionary prayer, i.e. asking God for things, is never appropriate, Lewis says. Only that's a small part of what it means to pray. So what does it mean our prayers don't get answered? For Lewis, that's not the right question. One reason for that has to do with being created with free will by an omnipotent God, who could do whatever we ask if God wanted to. But that's not the point: "For He seems to do nothing of Himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what He could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what He would have us do, or to fail. Perhaps we do not fully realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to coexist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every moment almost a sort of divine abdication. We are not mere recipients or spectators. We are either privileged to share in the game or compelled to collaborate in the work." If the question Does prayer work is the wrong question, then what's the right one? If your prayers are answered, does that mean you are special in God's eyes? And if they're not, does that mean God has forsaken you? We'll talk all about it in our conversation tomorrow evening, Tuesday May 13. Join us for the discussion starting at 7pm at Casa Real in downtown Oxford.
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