Latest Posts
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Haggai and the Expectation of the Experience of God’s Presence: Part 1
Read more: Haggai and the Expectation of the Experience of God’s Presence: Part 1The Book of Haggai tells a story of expectation, confusion, and reorientation. In this book, written by one of the 12 Old Testament minor prophets, the people of Israel, just recently returned from their Babylonian enforced exile, are admonished by Yahweh (the personal name of the God of the OT) for their complacency and misplaced…
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Weighing Words: The Metaphor of Gravity
Read more: Weighing Words: The Metaphor of GravityAs a student devoted to the intersection of theology and literature I’m always assessing ways in which literature accomplishes theological work and how theological thought appears in literary form. Most often these points of conversion occur by means of metaphor. To refresh your memory, metaphor is a kind of comparison in which one thing is…
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Reflections: A Boomerang Effect
Read more: Reflections: A Boomerang EffectOne of my latest antics in life happens to be pursuing another degree in biomedical diagnostics. Now, as a pastor, it’s obvious that there’s really no purpose for me to do so, but I’ve been finding this program quite unique and challenging, maybe not necessarily in content but in my personal walk with the…
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A Pauline Call for a Christian Meat Taboo
Read more: A Pauline Call for a Christian Meat TabooJohn M.G. Barclay, ‘Food, Christian Identity and Global Warming: A Pauline Call for a Christian Food Taboo’, The Expository Times 121 (2010): 585-93. Over the past couple years I have repeatedly returned to the article listed above. Not because I forget about the main point, but because I find it incredibly compelling. I just keep…
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The Cursed Child Is The 8th Harry Potter Story After All! Putting the Cart before the Horcrux
Read more: The Cursed Child Is The 8th Harry Potter Story After All! Putting the Cart before the HorcruxRecently Harry Potter fans celebrated the arrival of the “nineteen years later” day from the epilogue on September 1st, 2017. Here’s an interesting write-up about this momentous occasion. In case you don’t know, this is the day that Harry and Ginny sent their son Albus Severus off to Hogwarts, which can be found in the…
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Charlottesville, Nashville, and Calvary
Read more: Charlottesville, Nashville, and CalvaryWhere to begin… Charlottesville The world knows of the American embarrassment that is the recent happenings in Charlottesville, Virginia. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists incited violence surrounding the profanely displayed statue of Confederate General and beater of freed slaves, Robert E. Lee. Gen. Lee’s brutality should be condemned along with the then-institution of chattel slavery. However, certain…
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Building a Different Type of Strength
Read more: Building a Different Type of StrengthThis post isn’t intended to shame you into working out, or for eating more than you ought, or overindulging in what is meant to be a delicacy as if it were a bowl of rice. I’m sure you feel as uncomfortable reading that as I do writing it, as these things already have major cultural…
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Towards a figural reading of… To Kill a Mockingbird?
Read more: Towards a figural reading of… To Kill a Mockingbird?This summer, I got to read through Ephraim Radner’s Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures. When we flipped the calendar to August, and I traded theology for middle school literature, sharpening the transition from student to teacher, I was surprised to discover how theologically rewarding my experience would be. I want to tell…
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German and Theology Summer School
Read more: German and Theology Summer SchoolJohannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Summer School 2017 I recently returned from three weeks in Mainz, Germany at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz for their International German and Theology Summer School 2017. I heard about the summer school from my colleague who attended the summer school last year in 2016. He had a great experience and recommended the program….
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Eating as Missions
Read more: Eating as MissionsI just came back from a week-long missions vision trip in the Philippines. It was a whirlwind of a trip, traveling to a new place everyday, but it was a great time of encouragement and eating, meeting and worshipping with other believers from different places. While the Philippines has recently been in the news, due to…