“100 Days to Go” was one of the main articles in the Sunday edition of the Cleveland paper, The Plain Dealer. 100 days to go before the November election, which those of us fortunate enough to live in the swing state of Ohio are reminded of about a b’zillion times each time the TV is on. We seemed to have moved past overt debates on the legitimacy of the religious faith of each candidate, whether it is Gov. Romney’s Mormon... Read more
Something has exploded on the blogosphere — and I have a feeling it’s only getting started. Jonathan Merritt, a young, up-and-coming Christian author and online columnist (and son of a prominent SBC pastor / former SBC president), has been “outed.” After publishing a column in which he declared his intention to continue to patronize Chic-fil-A –– despite the calls for protests — it caught the attention of gay, former evangelical blogger, Azariah Southworth. The column, you might say, was a... Read more
I’m going to jump into the on-going topic (see Daniel Harrell’s posts in this blog) of “summer reading.” Summer is quickly slipping away, it seems, but there’s enough time to get some quality reading done. I’m going to suggest just three books that I think are well-worth your time and money (depending on your interests, of course). I’d love for others of you to include other recommendations in the comment section. 1. Christianity After Religion, by Diana Butler Bass. This... Read more
Over at a friend’s house the other night, the conversation kept going back to high school as if that was the high peak of people’s lives even as they’ve moved into middle age. What is it about those experiences of youth—the fleeting moments of adventure and love and excitement (or at least as we remember them) that haunt us as we get older? Julian Barnes in his best-seller, The Sense of an Ending, let’s us explore this reality through the eyes of... Read more
Justified by Use Lutheran theologian Oswald Bayer reminds us that in An Essay on Human Understanding, John Locke argues that “person” is a “forensic term.” The need to justify one’s existence to one’s self and to others, to gain and maintain recognition, is the foundation of the human condition under the sun. In this transactional, leveraged, economy, we are what we do, we give in order to receive, and we use others as means to our ends, enlisting them, often... Read more
Here we go again. Another shooting and the very low expectation that we will have serious conversations about the role which guns have in our culture. The “talking heads” on the various news programs acknowledge that this recent event of the shootings at the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, will unlikely produce any substantive conversation about gun control, especially military assault rifles, like just one of the guns used by the shooter in Aurora. The political will is just not... Read more
Today’s post is by guest blogger Tim Conder. Tim is the founding pastor of Emmaus Way in Durham, NC and a PhD candidate in “Culture, Curriculum, and Change” at the University of North Carolina. He serves as a board member at The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. He is also the author of two books, Free for All: Rediscovering the Bible in Community and The Church in Transition: The Journey of Existing Churches into the Emerging Culture and has... Read more
This is a guest post by Steph Roberts, an artist and art professor in Chicago. She also happens to be my sister. For more information on her and her work (with samples) go here Why do Artists Cry? It’s a bit awkward losing one’s composure in an art museum. The hushed, reserved, brightly lit galleries of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts may seem an unlikely place to see someone wiping away tears in a gush of emotion. It was opening day... Read more
In a cabin on a lovely little lake (one of ten thousand) just outsidethe Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, it’s only appropriate that I would be reading the reflections of Sigurd Olson, who according to Wikipedia, was “an American author, an environmentalist, and advocate for the protection of wilderness. For more than thirty years, he served as a wilderness guide in the lakes and forests of the Quetico-Superior country of northern Minnesota and northwestern Ontario. He was known honorifically as the Bourgeois — a term the voyageurs of old used of their... Read more
We live in a bipolar and schizophrenic culture. On one hand it is extremely crude and licentious and on the other, excruciatingly puritanical and legalistic. A robust and mature Christian cultural witness recognizes that this is two sides of the same coin, and thus resists the temptation to reduce the radicality of the gospel into “Christian virtues” that are then applied to artistic and other cultural practices in an effort to regulate and maintain an aesthetic of public decency (i.e.,... Read more
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