Are Christian Apologetics Still Relevant?

Last updated on: June 25, 2024 at 5:44 pm By Rob Giannamore

What is Apologetics? Historically, apologetics is the task of presenting a well-reasoned, intellectual defense of the truth claims of the Christian faith. In the early church, persecuted Christians defended the faith against paganism, polytheism, and political threats. Over the last thirty years, though, we have observed a new Christianity arise. This new(ish) form has been seen before in many iterations, but this new Christianity that we are observing is more insidious, more rigid, more extreme. Are “apologetics just another “right-wing” tactic to impose... Read more

Exploring the Spiritual Depths of Psalm 42

Last updated on: June 21, 2024 at 9:59 am By Rob Giannamore

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Psalm 42 My morning prayers, Lauds today had me thinking about Psalm 42. It got me thinking about how this Psalm can teach us how to deal with challenging times. Using the framework I posited in my other post this week, using lectio, oratio, contemplatio and meditatio, let us consider Psalm 42 (From the NIV version): As the deer pants for streams of water, so, my soul pants for you, my God. 2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.... Read more

The Spiritual Journey of Being Present

Last updated on: June 19, 2024 at 9:51 am By Rob Giannamore

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The process of being present is a spiritual journey. I was talking to a client about the contemplative life this morning. In the world of psychology and therapy, mindfulness is a huge attention getter, and everyone talks about it like it is some magical event. After twenty-seven years of practice, I can say that contemplative practice has been one of the best and the worst experiences I have had in my faith journey. While there are mountain top experiences, these... Read more

Questing: Three Days on the Appalachian Trail

Last updated on: June 13, 2024 at 2:43 pm By Rob Giannamore

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Questing is a spiritual practice that helps one clarify the mind and free oneself temporarily from the burdens of life to focus on their own spiritual journey. After about seven months of planning, June 7 finally arrived, and I was on my way to New York to hike the eighty-six-mile section of the Appalachian Trail in New York. The bags were packed, the body ready, the mind sharp. At least that is what I thought when I left on Friday,... Read more

What Defines Our Humanity?

Last updated on: June 7, 2024 at 7:24 pm By Rob Giannamore

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What Shapes Our Humanity? What shapes our humanity? I was having a conversation the other day and this question came up. The idea I posited was that time was a human made illusion. To push this further then, I then suggested that at a basic level, we only need food, water, shelter and satisfy our primal urges to procreate. Everything else we believe we need and is human made constructs. The Beauty of Being Human I was reading about... Read more

Exploring Jewish Ontology

Last updated on: June 5, 2024 at 9:56 am By Rob Giannamore

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Tales from the Holocaust How does a Jewish Ontology inform our Christian faith? This semester, I had my students look at Victor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning to explore the meaning of life using a Jewish Ontological lens. In Frankl’s book, he describes his journey of suffering and his endurance to survive. In his exploration and in his writings, he demonstrates to the reader how we have the power to make meaning no matter even in the worst situations. In Frankl’s... Read more

Transform Your Life: Practical Tips for Spiritual Growth

Last updated on: June 2, 2024 at 11:05 am By Rob Giannamore

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If you do not like who you are, you won’t like who you are becoming. People come to me all week to work out things that they do not like about themselves. Some of the biggest changes I see in people take months, sometimes years. Spiritual growth is a process that too takes years to attain. Stages of Spiritual/Religious Maturity As a pastor, I was and still am very interested in how people come into their faith and how... Read more

Is Non-Duality the Key to Liberation from Ego?

Last updated on: June 2, 2024 at 8:46 am By Rob Giannamore

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From “Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander”: Thomas Merton, pages 153-154 In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of... Read more

“My leg hairs are part of me”

Last updated on: September 19, 2024 at 8:41 am By Rob Giannamore

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An odd title indeed. It has been an odd week. This line was made to me by a client last week and we laughed together and then I asked them what they meant. Because of confidentiality I can’t go into their answer, but suffice it say we are all the same. This is the problem; I continue to find it curious that people are so broken that they come to me. In the past, we had systems such as church,... Read more

Embracing a Childlike Wonder in our Spiritual Practice

Last updated on: May 25, 2024 at 4:47 pm By Rob Giannamore

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The writer Paul offers in 1 Corinthians 13 these thoughts, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways” (1 Corinthians 13:11). This essay is an addition to the discussion I had in a previous post around the spiritual practice of Wonder, you can find it here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/loveopensdoors/2023/11/eyes-of-a-child-the-spiritual-practice-of-wonder/ What does it Mean to be Childlike... Read more