Latest Posts
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Check out my New Article on Pauline Chronology and Eschatology
Read more: Check out my New Article on Pauline Chronology and EschatologyMy new article in Journal of Biblical & Theological Studies is now officially out. The paper is entitled, “Eschatological Emphases in 1 Thessalonians and Galatians: Distinct Argumentative Strategies Related to External Conflict and Audience Response.” In this article I am addressing a couple of different issues at once. To begin, there is the issue of the chronological…
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“Hurrahing in Harvest”: Exploring an ‘inChristed’ Reality
Read more: “Hurrahing in Harvest”: Exploring an ‘inChristed’ RealityEven in the midst of the industrustrialization of England during the 19th century, poet and priest Gerard Manley Hopkins insists upon the sustaining and revealing presence of Christ in the physical world. In his Petrarchan sonnet, “Hurrahing in Harvest,” the poet, reflecting upon the late summer fields ripe with abundance, encounters Christ whose presence stirs…
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Climbing Down the Ivory Tower
Read more: Climbing Down the Ivory TowerI recently read an article by Leonard Cassuto on career diversity, and how David Porter, an English professor at the University of Michigan teaches a graduate seminar on helping students look at other job opportunities outside of teaching positions and academia. This article gives me hope as it shows how colleges and universities are finding…
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A Response to “The Statement on Social Justice and The Gospel”
Read more: A Response to “The Statement on Social Justice and The Gospel”I recently read “The Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel” formed by a group of fourteen men, signed by John MacArthur and many other Christian leaders with over 6,000 signers. They state how they do not see social justice issues as essential to the gospel and how the emphasis of social justice can detract…
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Fundamentalism and Recent Trends in Evangelicalism
Read more: Fundamentalism and Recent Trends in EvangelicalismWhat is Fundamentalism? Christian fundamentalists (think R.A. Torrey, A.C. Dixon, or recently, John Piper, Norman Geisler, Paul Washer, John MacArthur, Wayne Grudem, etc.) are part of the movement in Evangelicalism that originated in 1910s America. This phrase has been used to connote religious bigotry, abuse, and close-mindedness, but fundamentalists are merely Evangelicals with a complex (we…
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Pushing Past Literalism
Read more: Pushing Past LiteralismEver since I started down the path of academic theology I have been plagued by a single word: “literal”. No other word has caused me near the same amount of frustration and headaches than this word. Not only is it often, ironically, ill defined and vague, it becomes, also ironically, a license to interpret or…
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Extending Grace To Your Church
Read more: Extending Grace To Your ChurchThe ideal church is like delicious, instant coffee. It doesn’t exist. Problems in church are not only realities, they are dead certainties given the fact that all churches unavoidably involve the inconvenience we dislike most — selfish people. We know from St. Paul’s letters that even the first churches were troubled by some serious problems….
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Three Takeaways from Rehearsing Scripture
Read more: Three Takeaways from Rehearsing ScriptureAnna Carter Florence Rehearsing Scripture: Discovering God’s Word in Community Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2018. Pp. 215, paperback, $16.99 ISBN 9780802874122. In Rehearsing Scripture, Rev. Dr. Anna Carter Florence (Peter Marshall Professor of Preaching at Columbia Theological Seminary) offers a compelling vision for how the Church can read scripture afresh by adopting it as a script…
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Bearing Fruit
Read more: Bearing FruitIn John 15:1-17, Jesus talks about “bearing fruit” and “friendship.” This is a reflection on the meaning of “bearing fruit” in Scripture, the ways in which John innovates a relationship between fruit, friendship, and death in this passage, and an argument about the counter-intuitive places I think we should look for friendship in Scripture. Bearing…
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Support Indie Filmmaking: “After the Gunflint”
Read more: Support Indie Filmmaking: “After the Gunflint”What is it about films like The Revenant and 127 Hours that grips us so much? One of my buddies (J. D. O’Brien) out here in the Twin Cities is a local filmmaker. His first major film was a documentary called Out in the Cold, which you can check out on Amazon Prime. Out in the Cold looks…