Income Distribution Within U.S. Religious Groups (Pew Forum)

Very interesting graphic up at The Pew Forum:
Link is here: http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=376

Pannenberg on sex, marriage, family, and religion

"...In every case, however, the necessary presupposition is that the community is experienced by its members as meaningful and its claims on the individual as justified. Only if this supposition is verified can the family become, not only for the children but also for the married couple and the parents themselves, the place where human beings undergo a 'second birth' as 'sociocultural personalities.' When this presupposed priority of the community over the individual is no longer acknowledged, the individuals involved will experience the claims of marital and familial obligations as a suppression of their freedom, and not least of their sexual freedom, and they will seek emancipation from these fetters. But the priority of the community over the individual is not self-evidently valid. It requires a justification and legitimation which in the final analysis can only be found in religion. Crises affecting the structure of authority in marriage and family will therefore always be religious crises as well..."

- Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell. London: T & T Clark, 2004, 437.

More good Pannenberg...

Ok, so I'm finding good stuff here, can you tell? Here's something that might not preach to modern Western society very well, but oooo! is it good:

"The connection between act and consequence and therefore the liability of culprits for their actions precede the development of the idea of guilt and create the objective need for such a development. It is only this objective state of affairs that forbids our making no distinction between guilt consciousness generally and the various kinds of neurotic guilt feelings, and deciding that since the latter exist, all guilt consciousness is the manifestation of a disease from which human beings ought to be liberated through a more humane type of education and through instruction of the masses. For if in fact there is a necessary connection between actions and their consequences, so that in the interaction that makes up society the consequences either strike back at the agent or do harm to social life itself, then it shows a lack of realism to shut our eyes to it and to declare that we can do without the idea of guilt, at least in the sense of holding agents responsible for the consequences of their actions."

- Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell. London: T & T Clark, 2004, 291.

Pannenberg rocks!

“The way of human beings to the (divine) reality in which they can ultimately ground their exocentric existence and thereby attain to their own identity is thus always mediated through the experience of the external world. This is especially true of the relationship with the other human beings, that is, with beings whose lives are characterized by the same question and experience. But having said this, we are back in principle with Herder’s conception according to which human beings need to be educated to be themselves—educated to reason, humanity, and religion—and that such education comes to them through their experience of their world but especially through dealings with other human beings, because the theme of those other lives is or has already been the same as that of their own.”

- Pannenberg, Wolfhart. Anthropology in Theological Perspective. Translated by Matthew J. O'Connell. London: T & T Clark, 2004, 70. (italics in original).

Thought for the day (or longer)...

"Church grows from within toward the outside, not vice versa."

-Ratzinger, Joseph Cardinal. Church, Ecumenism, and Politics: New Endeavors in Ecclesiology. Translated by Michael J. Miller et al. San Franscisco: Ignatius Press, 2008, p. 15.