God’s Will: Have We Misunderstood?
What loving entity wants his son/himself to be tortured to death, even if it is for the greater good? What kind of messed up entity designs a plan for their child/themself to be tortured to death, even if it is for the greater good?
Who Uses the Liturgical Calendar?
Do all Christians follow the liturgical calendar? The question is more complicated than it first appears.
What Do the Liturgical Colors Mean?
If you weren’t raised in a Christian tradition that uses a liturgical calendar, you might wonder why it is and why it matters. Here are six quick facts about the Church calendar.
How Is the Church Year Divided?
The church calendar divides the 12-month calendar into two large parts...Each tradition may have slight variations on how they divide the church-year calendar.
What is the Liturgical Calendar?
The liturgical calendar is part of the Christian religion…Some Christian traditions that don’t consider themselves liturgical still have a church-year calendar.
Six Facts About the Liturgical Calendar
If you weren’t raised in a Christian tradition that uses a liturgical calendar, you might wonder why it is and why it matters. Here are six quick facts about the Church calendar.
Gods of Wrath
Search the internet for “deities gods goddesses” and browse the results. Many cultures have a god or gods that need appeasing… Then we come to the Hebrew God of the Old Testament.
Product Review: Thigh Society Cooling Anti-Chafe Slip Short Underwear
I debated for a year about purchasing the Thigh Society Cooling Anti-Chafe Slip Short.
Book Review: Simply Good News
“What is the good news that Jesus himself announced and told his followers to announce as well (2)?” This question frames the purpose of the entire book and Wright takes readers along as he works through the question in the context of 21st-century Western Christianity.
Imagining a Third Way
Despite the usefulness of dualistic thinking in speeding up daily decision making, as beings capable of creative thought, there is also value in intentionally identifying the binary and looking for a third way.
Book Review: Professional Sexual Ethics: A Holistic Ministry Approach
The 21 contributors to Professional Sexual Ethics: A Holistic Ministry Approach, edited by Patricia Beattie Jung and Darryl W. Stephens (Fortress, 2013) have diverse biases, but all the essays contribute to the premise that humans, and therefore people who work in ministry, are sexual, so sexuality is part of everything a minister does.
Does US Food Culture Train Our Religious Preferences?
Has necessity turned into a forgetfulness of what goodness tastes like? Have the limitations of necessity trained us to not want to look for better?
Nine Day Hiking and Campus Visit Trip: Part 5, On Campus and Home
My knees and feet hurt so much on Saturday evening that I had decided to keep Sunday as a recovery day. I planned a gentle walk at Jacob’s Nature Park and then a stroll through downtown. My feet had other plans.
Nine Day Hiking and Campus Visit Trip: Part 4, Buffalo Mountain
My knees and feet hurt so much on Saturday evening that I had decided to keep Sunday as a recovery day. I planned a gentle walk at Jacob’s Nature Park and then a stroll through downtown. My feet had other plans.
Nine Day Hiking and Campus Visit Trip: Part 3, The Channels, VA
It took me 2.5 hours to reach The Channels. People came up behind me and came back down in the time it took me to go up. I felt old and slow.
Nine Day Hiking and Campus Visit Trip: Part 2, Travel to Lebanon, VA
Early Friday morning, I reserved a hotel room for that night, selected purely on low price and proximity to The Channels trailhead. A secondary desire was to go somewhere I hadn’t been before, which is partly how I ended up reserving a room in Lebanon, VA.
Nine Day Hiking and Campus Visit Trip: Part 1, Packing
This is how I thought about what to pack for a nine-day road trip for on-campus grad school classes.
The Misery of High-Waisted Pants
Although there is no comfort like that of custom-fitted clothing, I long for the day when I can just buy comfortable clothes when I need them.
On Teaching Biblical Languages
In all of my experiences formally studying a language, the one constant is that it feels like the class is designed to meet a checklist rather than to create an environment for learning. To paraphrase my orchestration professor, you can water all you want, but the plant will grow when it grows. In other words, you can do all the homework and review and drills you want, but the concepts will click and the words transfer to long-term memory on a timeline that is not always within the student’s control.