January 24, 2017

I’m standing in a dimly candle-lit room full of strangers, staring at the faces of long dead-saints, and hearing the chants of a priest I can barely understand. No, this isn’t some nightmare of mine, this is my first Vespers service at an Orthodox church. A Vespers service is quite the beautiful affair. With the songlike chanting and the many candles and intimate feel, it evokes a sense of magic, I think. The history of the liturgy practically smells of... Read more

November 23, 2016

When your life collapses it doesn’t always catch you off guard. Sometimes you can feel it coming from a long way off, like a great storm in the desert. Read more

November 15, 2016

To imagine Hillary singing her own Hallelujah in the wake of this historic loss was simultaneously jarring and deeply healing. It summed it all up, somehow, perfectly. Read more

October 5, 2016

Friends (at least those of you who are still checking this blog from time to time), I’ve done this once before, but the time has come to seal the deal, for real. It’s time to officially say, “Farewell.” I came to the Patheos Progressive Christian channel to work out a faith transition that was happening in my own life, and, I think at least to an extent, in the church at large. While I’ve never been particularly stoked on the... Read more

August 16, 2016

This article has appeared at Onfaith & ChristianWeek. There is a groundswell taking place, a grassroots Christian movement if you will, that centers on renewing charismatic and Pentecostal faith for the twenty-first century. And I think this movement just might be the most exciting area of emergence in the American church today. While this groundswell is diverse, there are some common threads that I want to identify and celebrate. Some of us who are a part of this growing trend... Read more

August 16, 2016

“You just have to have faith.” “Pray harder.” “Fast more selflessly.” “Wait on God more patiently.” I had big gold stars by all the Christian categories of waiting, and my uterus was still a barren wasteland. Read more

August 16, 2016

“You just have to have faith.” “Pray harder.” “Fast more selflessly.” “Wait on God more patiently.” I had big gold stars by all the Christian categories of waiting, and my uterus was still a barren wasteland. Read more

August 1, 2016

Last week I came across this trailer for the brand new movie Hacksaw Ridge, starring Andrew Garfield and Sam Worthington. And it’s basically the gospel of peace displayed in stark relief on the silver screen: I had a strong emotional response to the trailer, first and foremost because the commitment to nonviolence in the thick of the world’s worst war is downright stunning, and because the way the character holds that commitment in a nonjudgmental and self-sacrificial manner is likewise... Read more

July 5, 2016

The first decade of the 2000’s was a pivotal one for American Christianity, with a palpable sense that the culture was rapidly shifting all around us. And this sense triggered a flood of thinking and writing on how the church must lean into that shift, especially in the ways we do church. Words like emerging, missional, and incarnational were used to describe the new thing that seemed to be happening. And all of these held an interesting attribute in common:... Read more

May 25, 2016

He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial. This quote, from Bonhoeffer’s classic Life Together, is also part of a chapter from a new book of essays entitled Called To Community (ed. Charles E. Moore). You can check out the current Patheos Book Club happening around this book here. Bonhoeffer’s essay centers on the subject of idealism,... Read more


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