So here's what I suggest. Mark Driscoll should take some of his royalties and hire a full-time prophet. Not a friend but an opponent. Not a pushover but a person of incisive intellect. Maybe not even a man but a woman. Someone like Deborah, who exercised enormous power among Israel's early judges (Judges 4). Like Huldah, whose prophecies led to intense reform (2 Kings 22). Read more
But that shy boy has, at least for now, at least last night, something that many soccer stars and Cambridge grads and concert masters may never know: unabashed generosity. “I have something that will help people. Make sure that you give them to people who are poor, to help them.” Read more
When I put these together, I saw something glaring. My actions were exactly backwards, a negative mirror image of Zaccheus. I had lingered, stayed away, from Jesus. When Jesus and I were together, I hurried away. Zaccheus hurried in order to have Jesus stay with him; I stayed away then, when I was with Jesus, hurried away. Read more
Last night was the memorial service, not just for Paul Lee, who died on Thursday, but for everyone affected by the SPU shooting. My twenty-two year old daughter and I came straight from the gym. We arrived about five minutes early, and the place was packed, so our friend Celeste said we could sit on the stage, facing out. So Chloe walked sheepishly up in her t-shirt, gym shorts and flip flops, and I toddled up, to lend a speck... Read more
My colleague, Rick Steele, wrote this essay for TIME magazine online in the aftermath of the shooting at Seattle Pacific University. It is significant, so I reproduce it here in full. ___________________________________________________________________________________________ Last Thursday afternoon around 3:30 p.m., a senseless act of violence visited Seattle Pacific University, where I teach. Within minutes, squad cars, fire engines, ambulances, helicopters, and TV news trucks had converged on the scene of shooting that took the life of one of our students and injured two others. The... Read more
As faculty, staff, and students grapple with the goings on at SPU, we discover gems. My colleague, Doug Koskela, read this bit of Wendell Berry’s poem to his students this morning. He sent it to us with a few words of explanation, which I include as preface to the poem. ______________________________________________________________________________________ In comments from students, colleagues, and alumni over the last few days, I’ve noticed the theme of particularity of place coming up a lot. Especially from alumni commenting on... Read more
On the day of the shooting at SPU, the religion editor at Huffington Post asked me to write. I didn’t think I could, but I woke up early on Friday to see if the young woman in surgery had survived. I started to write. I kept writing. This is what I wrote: ____________________________ I expected the shock of an earthquake–not a shooting. In fact, they’re retrofitting our oldest building, Alexander Hall, to prevent earthquake damage. How do we retrofit Otto Miller Hall... Read more
We can sneer at the Pentecostals, given the aberrations and excesses of their faith, but we might be, in the long run, outsiders looking into the future of Christianity. Read more
Their giving wasn’t determined by how much was needed but by how much they had to give. We have no clue that the prophet Agabus did anything more than announce the famine; he didn’t order them to give, tell them who should give, or how much. The believers in Antioch simply decided to give because they felt they had enough, even plenty. Read more
But there are other tears to be wept in The Family. In an eerie parallel to the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22:6, "And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son,” Laskin describes how sixteen year old Shimon Senitski was forced to carry logs to a forest clearing outside the Nazi slave labor camp of Klooga in Estonia, how the boy was shot in the head with the other surviving slaves just days before the camp was liberated, and how his body was incinerated in a vast pyre of logs and corpses. Read more
spiritchatter
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In