• Minecraft and Time Wasting

    Today I was ploughing through Philo’s Quis rerum divinarum heres sit when I suddenly hit a mental wall. Maybe it was the peanut M&Ms I had been snacking on earlier in the day or just the post lunch lethargy that slowly leeches at my concentration everyday around 3pm. Either way I couldn’t go on. Looking…

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  • Switchfoot and Karl Barth

    Switchfoot is one of my favorite bands of all time.  Each of their albums is like meeting a new friend – at first, I’m not sure if we’re going to connect like I hoped we would, but over time my appreciation deepens to the point that my life is different because of our friendship.  I…

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  • Inaccurate Noahs

    On March 28th Darren Aronofsky’s Noah will hit the big screens. Here’s the trailer, if you haven’t seen it yet. Big name director, big name stars, lots of CGI and Russel Crowe looking determined-against-all-odds. Good stuff. But the subject matter has a lot of people upset and debating whether or not this is a movie…

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  • The Parable of the Lost Check

    “Suppose a woman has just received her family’s income tax refund checks, one state and the other federal, in the mail and she loses one. (She swears seeing it on the coffee table yesterday and cannot for the life of her find it today.) Won’t she and her husband turn on all of the lights…

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  • Believe! From The Lego Movie and John 3:16

    “It may seem like a Cat Poster, but you must believe,” is one of my favorite quotes in The Lego Movie. In a crisis moment where the protagonist, Emmet, doesn’t know what to do and feels hopeless, his mentor, Vitruvius, tells him to believe, even though it may seem like a cliche from a Cat…

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  • If Only…

    I’ve always thought of Lust as only having to do with sex. It was always held up for me as the opposite of purity, chastity, virginity. When I think about it now, I realize that this narrow definition has actually become quite a convenient for me as a 21st Century American Christian. In limiting the…

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  • Esther in Ancient Jewish Thought (by Aaron Koller)

    I just had the privilege of reading Aaron Koller’s new book on Esther which came out just a few weeks before mine (Esther and Her Elusive God). I would have liked to engage him in my book, but this brief review will have to suffice (for now). Aaron Koller, who is Associate Professor of Near Eastern and…

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  • Childish Faith

    Here’s a fun video: In case you don’t want to watch it: the video illustrates how 15 very common scientific illustrations are, technically speaking, inaccurate. Imprecise might be a better word. They don’t actually tell you what is going on in. I doubt very many people watching this thought, “Oh no, my trust in science…

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  • Power(less) Worship

    The rain pelted the hoods of our jackets as we rushed under the shelter of the awning, standing alongside the others waiting to enter the sanctuary.  We stepped through the doors and headed towards our normal pew section (we don’t want to sit in the same pew each week, but being people of habit, we…

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  • Thumb War

    ‘Tis the season for self-control. The beginning of Lent always seems to inspire a flurry of resolutions and prohibitions, sometimes the same ones we made at the outset of the year then promptly forgot to keep. As we begin this season of intentional identification with Christ’s wilderness experience and self-denial, my husband and I are…

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