SMcK: I had lunch recently with a pastor who confessed to me that a few years ago he seriously contemplated suicide, so this post by John Frye struck a chord with me. A Pastor’s Suicide I have noticed in social media the sudden appearance of posts about pastors who commit suicide. These reports jolt me and unsettle me as I am sure they do others. This all came very close to home a month ago. A pastoral colleague, a friend,... Read more
IS THE LAKE OF FIRE TORTURE? by Josh Butler, author of the just-out and excellent book, The Skeletons in God’s Closet. More about Josh below. Many a street preacher has used the “lake of fire,” an image in Revelation, to depict God as a sadistic torturer who likes to roast unrepentant rebels like kalua pigs over an eternal spit once the stopwatch runs out. But is torture really the point of this image? I would like to suggest, in contrast,... Read more
Bob Smietana: For a look at the future of the church in America, it’s time for pastors to go back to school. Not to seminary—but to their local public schools. More than half the students (50.3 percent) nationwide are ethnic minorities, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That’s up from 37 percent in 1997, according to Pew Research. This is just one sign of how the United States is becoming a multiethnic nation. Consider this: In 1960, 85 percent... Read more
Philip Yancey has a new book coming out Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?. This book tackles a topic that is down to earth real in my world and makes an interesting complement to Tuesday’s post Coming Soon … “The Talk”?. In his NY Times opinion piece David Barash argues that science has undermined any rational basis for faith in God and describes a no nonsense approach that makes this clear to his students. He can get... Read more
If one keeps an ear close enough to the ground one might just hear a subtle shift at work in kingdom and heaven language. It works a bit like this: Heaven no longer matters that much but kingdom language is awesome. That language about the future kingdom has quietly become either a fictional, rhetorical utopia or not much more than a way of getting people to be more concerned about the Here and Now. And that kingdom language can get... Read more
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This post is by Jonathan Storment, and you can pray for him and his family as they welcome a new baby! Congratulations! Outside Christian Love “In those days there was no king and everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” –the book of Judges “It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live together.”-Dietrich Bonhoeffer The most important lens for understanding Paul’s vision of being inside a community of “Christian love” isn’t the word love.... Read more
Now that we are Anglicans we have become much more aware of the church calendar and, inasmuch as the good Rector Jay Greener and Curate Amanda Holm Rosengren invite me to join in on the teaching/preaching team, I have begun to think about how preaching over an entire year. I grew up in the kind of evangelicalism that either preached through a book in the Bible until the preacher was done or on a series until it was done, but... Read more
Why do doctors not care for Obamacare? Sean Williams: According to a report released last month by the Physicians Foundation, which surveyed more than 20,000 physicians and is released every other year, just 25% of those surveyed would give the ACA an A or B grade, while 46% would give Obamacare a grade of D or F. But, when push comes to shove, it really doesn’t matter whether or not physicians like or dislike Obamacare, because it remains the law of the... Read more
How do we prepare our people, young and old, for “The Talk”? There was an interesting opinion piece in the NY Times a week ago. David Barash, an evolutionary biologist and psychology professor at the University of Washington described how he gives “The Talk” to his undergraduate biology students: God, Darwin and My College Biology Class. “The Talk” isn’t about sex, but about religion and evolution. More importantly, about what he sees as the incompatibility of science and religion. As... Read more
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