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I was changed by an old book many years ago: On the Religious Affections by Jonathan Edwards.  Edwards, a leader in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, spoke of the need to have the “affections”–the emotional, affective, feeling regions awakened.  He described the hard heart of Ezekiel’s prophecy as an unfeeling, inert, unresponsive heart.  And he had a very physical understanding of the affections, using words like humours, fluids, and the like to refer to them.  The bodily effects of feeling: weeping, tears, a stirring in the pit of the stomach, flushing of the face, warmth.
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Today marks the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, a man whose name has been much maligned by many in my own American evangelical tribe.

My friend, Carl Safina, an ocean conservationist and author of the acclaimed Song for the Blue Ocean told me that his two heroes are Charles Darwin and Jesus; Darwin for revealing the unity of all living things, and Jesus for teaching us to love our enemies. Would that my fellow believers understood as well the rule of Jesus, a rule which demands that we bother to understand each other.
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