Latest Posts
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Faith and Love: The Inconvenient Truth About a “Personal Relationship With God”
Read more: Faith and Love: The Inconvenient Truth About a “Personal Relationship With God”How’s your relationship with God? It’s a question many Christians and religious people ask of each other. When I answer this question over the years, I typically work my way through the same cluster of questions—am I praying and spending private time with God, am I avoiding certain sins, am I maturing in my likeness to…
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Atonement Conference at St Andrews
Read more: Atonement Conference at St AndrewsHere is the CfP for a conference on the Atonement at the University of St Andrews. I co-organized a few of the earlier iterations of this symposium: one on Reactions to Empire and another on Ancient Reading techniques. I’m happy to see that the symposium is still going strong. If you do any work on…
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Reflections of a Recovering Fatalist
Read more: Reflections of a Recovering FatalistI was an athlete growing up, extremely competitive both then and now, and never gave up during any sort of competitive setting no matter how dire the situation was. For whatever reason, this attitude stayed on the field and was entirely vacant for most of my life outside of sports. On the field, I was…
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Do you do well to be angry?
Read more: Do you do well to be angry?This week’s lectionary readings began with Jonah; to be specific, the end of his story. Taken all together, the four readings weave a portrait of the encounter of an angry man with a generous God. This fall, God has been generous, and I have been angry. So this was a helpful week. Here’s what I’ve learned,…
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The True Story Behind The Handmaid’s Tale
Read more: The True Story Behind The Handmaid’s TalePhoto Credit: https://www.emmys.com/events/fyc/2017/the-handmaids-tale The Handmaid’s Tale, a popular Hulu drama series, just won eight Emmy Awards, including the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series. The series, which is based on the book by Margaret Atwood, follows the story of Offred, a handmaid, during a time where America falls under an extreme fundamentalist “Christian” totalitarian…
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Leaving your Church in Tears
Read more: Leaving your Church in TearsI left my Church this week, and it was the most painful and beautiful thing I have ever done. For many people, Church can be a great source of pain, for others, it is a building or a place to gather. For some, Church can be a crutch, a community that supports them. As for…
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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…