One week from today, I’m headed to Sri Lanka with a coterie of fellow bloggers. We’re being hosted by World Vision, and they’ll be showing us some of the development work in that country. To celebrate this coming journey, we’re having a little contest/giveaway. We’ve put together four identical prize packages, a collection of some of our favorite books, music, and World Vision apparel. To each of those four prize packs we will add something from Sri Lanka, a unique prize made... Read more
So the guy who had the ill-fated anti-gay burning-Cheerios oops-I-started-the-lawn-on-fire protest at General Mills last week, this guy: died over the weekend of a heart attack, making his #protestFAIL less funny. Read more
For the fourth year in a row, I spent the last weekend surrounded by celebrities in the wine industry at the Texas Sommelier Conference, popularly known as TexSom. For me, attending a sommelier conference is a lot like a sommelier attending AAR. There’s lots of lingo that I don’t know — an entire language of wine that is foreign to me — just see the Twitter stream for examples. (I get in because my wife is a brilliant photographer, and... Read more
Part of an ongoing series on Everyday Spirituality, this is a guest post by Linda Peacore. Linda and I were classmates at Fuller Theological Seminary in the early 1990s. She went on to get a PhD in theology from King’s College, London, and she now resides in Pasadena and teaches at Fuller. I recommend her book, The Role of Women’s Experience in Feminist Theologies of Atonement, which I wrote about here. If you’d like to write a post for this series, please... Read more
Last week, I challenged Progressive Theo-Bloggers to say something substantive about God. I then clarified what I hoped for. Thus far, I’ve been very heartened by the response. I’ve already got 30 posts queued up, and the challenge goes through this Friday (so there’s still time for you to join in!). Patheos will be building a landing page where, next week, we will post links to all of the contribution. (So, there’s some further incentive: If you want a permanent... Read more
…by saying stuff about what God is not. That is, by writing some apophatic theology. (Don’t worry, I’ll write substantive stuff about God next week!) God Is Not Male I think this sentiment is more palatable these days than it was fifty years ago because we are now aware of the complexities of gender. The meanings of words like “masculine” and “feminine,” “manly” and “womanly,” have been pretty thoroughly deconstructed. Thus, it’s really not even accurate to say, “God has characteristics... Read more
So, my Challenge to Progressive Theo-Bloggers has been well received, prompting many responses from across the blogosphere. You can see the Storify stream where I’ve been curating all of the posts, poems, and even tweets that have come in. There have been some objections, and I’ve got some observations. First, the objections. Firstly, I wrote, Write something substantive about God. Not about Jesus, not about the Bible, but about God. That prompted responses like this: Maybe Benjamin is right and... Read more
This post is part of the Patheos Book Club. Check out the Book Club for more posts on this book, an interview with the author, and for responses from other bloggers and columnists. There’s a lot that Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove thinks and write that I agree with. His last book, for instance, inspired me to write about Why I’m Staying Put. He and his family are committed to staying in Durham, NC, and my family and I have made the same... Read more
I’ve been writing recently about the problems with liberal Christianity, and I had a thought this morning. It was prompted by a recent phone conversation I had with the managing editor of a major publishing house, combined with my faithful listening to the Theology Nerd Throwdown podcast, and the silliness of all the hand-wringing about Chik-fil-A. These have prompted me to think that progressives have a God-talk problem. That is, progressives write lots of books and blog posts about social issues,... Read more
If you’d like the potential of me meeting your sponsor child when I’m in Sri Lanka later this month, you’ve got to sign up for sponsorship by this Wednesday. That’s the deadline, so if you’re considering it, don’t wait much longer! Thanks for considering it. Read more
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