This sketch by Sarah Pulliam Bailey is so, so true of Northern Seminary, too. Maybe it is time for you to enroll in seminary, too. After spending 16 years in government-related jobs, Alan Felton gave up an income of about $90,000 to return to school in 2010. He quit his job in North Carolina’s department of revenue and moved his wife and two teenagers from a 4,000-square-foot home to a 1,800-square-foot parsonage while he was attending a seminary. Like many... Read more
Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. Read more
Source You’re in for a treat today as Meredith and her husband Curtis share the interesting story of how he came to hold his egalitarian position. She said: I picked my seminary, in no small part, because it fully supported women in ministry. They had decided the issue long ago, and so I expected to experience a learning environment that responded to me as a unique person, not as my gender. This was indeed the case. I studied theology in undergrad... Read more
David Moore, who blogs at www.twocities.org, conducted the following interview. Cornelius Plantinga (aka Neal) is Senior Research Fellow at the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. He recently served as president of Calvin Theological Seminary. He also taught theology at Calvin for many years. Plantinga is the author of several highly regarded books. His recent book, Reading for Preaching: the Preacher in Conversation with Storytellers, Biographers, Poets, and Journalists, framed the following interview: Moore: What was the motivation behind writing this... Read more
To my knowledge, a student has never Rickroll’d me in a paper or essay, but this physics student pulled it off. A high school student managed to “rickroll” his physics teacher, cleverly inserting the lyrics of Rick Astley’s ’80s hit “Never Gonna Give You Up” and lining the words up perfectly. Even more impressive, the essay on scientist Niels Bohr actually makes perfect sense. It’s hard enough to write a physics essay, but we don’t even want to think about... Read more
So, how do you respond to information like this from Oxfam? How do kingdom realities influence how we see this? What does this say about or to church life? Given the scale of rising wealth concentrations, opportunity capture and unequal political representation are a serious and worrying trend. For instance: The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world. Almost half of the world’s wealth is now owned by just one... Read more
John W. Frye This is our final post with the Woman at the Well story when she meets a post-evangelical Jesus. Exhausted from global warming in oppressed Palestine, Jesus chilled at Jacob’s Well in the realm of “the other” called Samaria. Jesus’ cohort left him to buy organic at the nearest fair-trade kiosk. A Samaritan woman, “the other,” approached the community’s gathering space, carrying a jar, the symbol of her status in a harsh, patriarchal culture. Jesus said to her,... Read more
What depresses me about Bible translation debates today is tribalism. Some have raised the bar of this conversation to such heights that variation is tantamount to heresy. But let’s have a little fun with the tribalism that does exist, that seems almost inevitable, that does sometimes lead to uncharitable divisiveness, but that can lead us to see ourselves in humorous tones at times. Translations can also be a window to our heart and theology and preferences. So here goes with a... Read more
CNN: (CNN) — U.S. prosecutors have filed charges against a security company, accusing it of faking completed background checks to bilk the government of millions of dollars. U.S. Investigations Services used a computer program to “flush” or “dump” background checks — labeling them as completed, when in fact they had not carried out a quality review as required by the government contract, prosecutors allege in a complaint. The fraudulent behavior involved at least 665,000 background investigations — about 40% of the... Read more
Source: A few years ago, a team of researchers led by a professor from UC Berkeley set out to test what they called the masculine overcompensation thesis, the theory that when men sense threats to their manhood, they respond by exaggerating their gender traits. The researchers used several approaches, from laboratory experiments to large-scale cross-sectional surveys, but they all confirmed that when men faced the implication that they were somehow not men, they tended to increase their support of war, homophobia,... Read more
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