St. Boniface House

Jamey Bennett summarizes an interesting argument by Peter Toon against the change from “And with your Spirit” to “And also with you” as a response to “The Lord be with you”.  Setting the exchange in the context of the liturgy and the relationship of the pastor/priest to the people is helpful, although I am unconvinced that the same meaning could not be found with “And also with you”.

The real question, as far as I’m concerned (and perhaps this is addressed in the book that Jamey is summarizing) is this: Why don’t we respond with “The Lord bless you”?  (See Ruth 2:4)

Doug Wilson recently noted in his blog that “various liberals are starting to emerge with “gotcha!” observations on the source of the disaster [Hurricane Katrina]– global warming, the U.S. backing out of the Kyoto treaty…RFK, Jr. wrote that Mississippi governor Haley Barbour has been reaping the whirlwind because of his earlier role in arguing for President Bush’s energy policy over against environmental policy” and argued that the time for such concerns are after the rescue efforts have been completed. He’s exactly right, of course. I would bet the farm, though, that the people who are making these sorts of ridiculous claims now are the same ones who saw a red mist when Jerry Falwell and others attributed the 9/11 catastrophe to God’s judgment on certain moral trends in America. In the end, then, what is apparent is that they were not objecting to the claim that “God judges wickedness” nor even “God is judging a particular kind of wickedness” but that they were objecting to that God judging that wickedness. The difference lies in devotion to a different god who has different moral concerns. But it is Yahweh, not the gods of the nations, who rides the clouds (see Deut.33:26, Isa. 19:1; Ps. 68).