Okay, a quick question. (Yes, I’m still taking a break. This doesn’t count. Seriously. It doesn’t. Stop it.) Did last night’s presidential debate change your mind, or decide it for you? Reading in various forums and so on a ton of responses to the debate, I got the impression that everybody who watched it already knew going in for whom they intended to vote (and, naturally, their man slaughtered the other guy). It got me wondering: Did the debate—or do any... Read more
Okay, I’m back. Well. Sort of. I am insofar as yesterday I made another thrilling video of myself … saying stuff … but was prevented from showing it, because for some inexplicable reason YouTube, after my making one video, permanently disabled my account. (??? Oh: you can see my first Very Exciting video here.) So today I opened a new YouTube account, and can now hoist upon you, poor reader viewer, the video I made yesterday. And here is that... Read more
Yesterday I made another thrilling video of myself talking into my MacBook. But when I went to mount it on YouTube, I got a message from YouTube saying that my account had been “permanently disabled”! I have no idea why that should happen. Perhaps someone at YouTube watched my first tape, and understood immediately that it needed to stop there. I’m trying to get YouTube-enabled again—and get the distinct impression I’m failing to. YouTube makes it pretty impossible to contact them.... Read more
A while back I told some Christian publishing and writing muck-a-mucks with whom I was having lunch that Crosswalk.com had engaged me to write a blog for them (everything I post here on “Suddenly Christian” also runs on Crosswalk and Christianity.com). “Oh, no,” said one of my lunch-mates, an author of “Christian Living”-type books. “I’ve done work like that before. It drives you crazy. You have to turn everything that happens to you into a little story lesson about God.”... Read more
After my wife Cat and I had spent six years as members of our very first church home–a Presbyterian USA church—we were asked to sign a document asserting that under no circumstances should anyone involved in a same-sex relationship be allowed to hold “any position, of any authority whatsoever” at that church. We had both been elected deacons of the church—which is how we learned that you couldn’t actually become a deacon at our church until you signed this document.... Read more
Yeah, so I was goofing around with my new MacBook, and decided to see if I could make and mount a video of myself blathering on about absolutely nothing. I don’t think I’ll ever do this again, because—well, yikes. But here’s what I got. Be forewarned that watching this video means never, ever getting back that one minute and fifty-five seconds. Read more
Sometimes, following a certain type of post I write (the most recent being Evangelist, or Ego-Driven Meddler?), I get an email or two telling me what a shabby excuse for a Christian I am. (Though let me hasten to add that for every one message I get in the “To [Hades] with you, devil boy!!” vein, I get thirty of the sort that make me blush with faux-modesty before I consider robbing a bank so that I can afford to go to... Read more
Ah, Sunday afternoon. How I hate it. It is, after all, naught but the itchy calm before the formidable storm of Monday morning. Of course, these days I wouldn’t know the formidable storm of Monday morning from my postman’s bad breath. These days I get paid to lay around the house all day, waiting for something brilliant to appear on my computer screen. Much, in fact, as I’m afraid you’re doing at this very moment. Gosh, but I hope you’re... Read more
Because of pieces I’ve lately posted, such as Christian Marrying a Non-Christian? Marriage: FAIL, and Letter From an Atheist Married to a Christian, I’ve received emails asking what my marriage was like during the two years between when I, at thirty-eight, converted to Christianity, and when, two years later, my wife Catherine had her baptism into the faith. It was fine. It was great. There wasn’t a moment of stress between Cat and me relative to my new perspective on... Read more
Wanna think about God? Then think about sex. Because what happens when you think about sex? You go bonkers. We all go bonkers whenever we think about sex, because the entire mega-realm of Our Sexuality quite thoroughly dominates our lives and consciousness—and yet none of us can understand or control our interior sexual lives anymore than we can sing La Traviata backwards. It is an unknowable, universal, life-producing, frightfully powerful force that defines and informs every aspect of our personal... Read more
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