In Acts 26 we encounter the apostle Paul as a prisoner on trial for his preaching: “King Agrippa,” Paul asked, “do you believe the prophets? I know that you believe.” And Agrippa said to Paul, “You almost persuade me to be a Christian!” And Paul said, “I would to God that not only you but also all who […]
Category: Love
Nihilism, Grace, and the Religion of the Rose
I just returned from a Caribbean cruise (my life is hard), and I brought two books with me: Chuck Klosterman’s The Visible Man, and John D. Caputo’s Hoping against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim. The former is a novel and is the one I was planning on reading (to be honest I wasn’t expecting to crack […]
Careful What You’re Thankful For
Like many of you, I will be spending the day with friends, family, and people I love. I’ll be eating turkey, having some good slash awkward conversations with plenty of eye-rolling, and watching a guy run the ball up the middle for a loss of yardage instead of just going around the defenders like he […]
Don’t Love God, Love the World Instead
I have given little hints here and there to the fact that my experience with God is largely characterized by divine absence, the “real absence of Christ” (to subvert a well-known theological formula). In short, the “every hair of your head” and “not a sparrow falls” passages resonated very little with me, if at all, […]
Trans-Jenner
I realize Caitlyn Jenner has been discussed ad nauseam by this point, but I would like to weigh in from a slightly different angle. I fully recognize that in some rare cases a person’s sex may not comport with their gender identification. For example, hermaphrodites (or “intersex” people) who were born with both sets of […]
Of Mysticism Sacred and Secular
I was recently watching HBO’s new documentary on Scientology, Going Clear, and was astounded at how so many wealthy, powerful, and seemingly intelligent people have bought in to L. Ron Hubbard’s bizarre and sci-fi inspired vision of the world. 75 million years ago some god called Xenu transported a bunch of humans to earth in a […]