You’ll see that I have a little ad in the right sidebar for Amazon mp3s. That’s because I buy most of my music at Amazon in order to avoid the iTunes encryption. Well, there are lots of excellent albums at Amazon for $5. And, for a couple days, they’re offering a Black Friday $3 coupon, which means those albums are $2. I thought about Johnny Cash or Charles Mingus, but ended up buying Regina Spektor. I plan to observe Buy... Read more
I grew up in a church that had a little piece of the Mayflower encased in glass. That’s right, when the Mayflower was decommissioned, it was torn apart and turned into a barn, and our pastor made a pilgrimage to that barn and stuck a little piece of it in his pocket. Above that Congregationalist relic hung a framed reproduction of the Mayflower Compact. I was joking with a Canadian friend this week that he didn’t have anything to celebrate... Read more
Here’s a taste: Postmodern Christians can live faithfully between the absence of absolute certainty and the abyss of extreme relativism. This middle ground promotes both humility and conviction. Postmodernists reject the idea that we can know with absolute certainty the full truth about reality. Absolute certainty requires inerrant sense perception. It requires a set of inerrant ideas. Or it requires inerrant interpretation of an inerrant source. Such inerrancy does not exist. This lack of absolute certainty about the full truth... Read more
One of the things that I haven’t blogged about before, but has been a part of my life for a while now, is that I am a single parent. This development was not expected, as I’m sure it isn’t for any single parent, nor has it been particularly easy. And while I will not be blogging about the circumstances that led to this situation, I do want to start writing about the joys and struggles of being a single dad.... Read more
From the Call & Response Blog at Duke: I heard an old-time evangelist preach to a full house here at Duke the other night. The crowd was buying what he was selling. They laughed at the jokes, nodded at the profound points and lined up for the altar call. The evangelist was Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. I mean him no disrespect by comparing him to an evangelist. He spoke with the boldness and conviction of Billy Sunday,... Read more
As part of my new book, The Teaching of the Twelve: Believing & Practicing the Primitive Christianity of the Ancient Didache Community, the editor, Jon Sweeney, and I wrote a new translation of the Didache. If you don’t know what the Didache is, um, well, buy the book! In short, it’s a little handbook of Christian life from a very early Christian community — I date it before the gospels. We’re going to make our translation available for free, via... Read more
Strangely, I seem to have a unique vantage point on the recent news that YouthWorks!, a youth mission organization headquartered in Minneapolis, has acquired Youth Specialties, the premier youth ministry event and publishing company. Before I explain my history with the organizations, let me be clear that I have no inside knowledge of the acquisition, nor have I even heard any gossip about how it’s going down. I do know that YS has struggled through the economic downturn, and I... Read more
Doc Todd is wondering why some disagreeable theology can be debated by Baptists, but other cannot: The sentiment spreads across the Country as those once affiliated with the evil trio of Pagitt, Jones and McLaren drop off to form their own movements and networks – and of course because these fellows are doctrine averse, relativists, and theological adrift in a new form of liberalism. Yes, there are two death knells that keep us from conversations with those whom we might... Read more
…an 18-stop blog tour in support of The Teaching of the Twelve (available for pre-order at right). Look for the tour to launch on November 30. Read more
I’m in the middle of four days of reading The New Christians aloud for Audible.com. (Yes, I’m just as surprised as you are that they’re interested in my book.) And, I’ve got to say, it’s one of the hardest things that I’ve ever done. I’m not kidding. I sit in a small closet with a book in my lap and an exorbitantly expensive microphone hanging over my head. And I read. And Ameen (owner of Mothlab) stops me. He stops... Read more
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