I HATE the church, but I LOVE Jesus I hear this so much. Stay with me, I’m probably going to get a little offensive. This strange separation of faith and community is all over the place. I have gone to the same church my entire life. It isn’t a perfect church, but it’s the family that I belong to. As I have grown up there I have watched literally hundreds of people bail and either...
We, The Biola Queer Underground, are a group of like-minded LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) students and allies who have formed a private underground community in which we share our life struggles, as well as our love and support for one another. The main problems that we see in the Biola community are the isolation, pain, and fear of LGBTQ people. Our desire is to create a place of love and unity for...
“Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind.” –Albert Einstein Anders Behring Breivik looks almost ghostly. In every picture that I see of him, he appears serious and menacing and totally unrepentant. This repentance he lacks should be for the murder of seventy-seven people last year when he both detonated a bomb in Oslo – killing eight – and arrived at a Labor Party Youth Camp in Utøya shortly after, killing sixty-nine...
The Industrial Revolution changed the world. It made possible much of the wealth and prosperity that would have otherwise remained elusive. But now, it also is destroying the environment and dehumanizing laborers. The good of the Industrial Revolution obscured the bad. The consequences, though they could have been predicted (and maybe were by some) remained unforeseen by the majority. About six month ago I lost my iPhone. I dropped it from my third story balcony, watched it...
My friend, Aaron, and I walked into a Mosque on a Sunday afternoon looking for a fight. Or at least I was. Aaron was just being nice by going with me. I was in a class that required me to dialogue with Muslims about their faith and my faith with a slant towards apologetics. As an American, my first thought was a real live Muslim? If you’re not from here (America) you probably don’t know...
One of the clients that I work with on a regular basis is autistic. This is a curse and a blessing. The curse is that for him, life is difficult. He can’t relate to other people in a typical fashion and this fact makes it hard to develop a relationship with him. The blessing is that he will always, without flinching, tell me his opinion. I know that I always get the truth when he...
In the past three years, I have moved three times. Each time I call upon the great physical strength of my friends – an area I am decidedly lacking in – and then offer them pizza. They don’t care about the pizza; it’s just a gesture. As we lug all of mine and my wife’s stuff down stairs, into a moving truck, and then back up stairs again, two thoughts occur to me. The first...
On bridges, in dark alleys, under freeway overpasses, in the middle of busy streets, and anywhere else there is room, a group of visionaries are making their art. They’re doing it on the city itself. From a familiar British phone booth murdered and left bleeding to the obscure yet iconic face of André René Roussimoff – better known as Andre the Giant – plastered across broad and tall surfaces all over LA, street art is...
I’m easy to talk to. I’m very intelligent. I’m an excellent communicator. I’m hilarious. I’m creative. These are all lies that I tell people everyday in hopes that my image isn’t sullied. I don’t tell them with my words – that would be too obviously arrogant. Instead, I only let certain parts of me show so that no one gets the idea that I have something wrong with me. This is probably an exercise in...
When I was kid, I learned all about Jesus’ miracles from boards covered in flannel. An old Egyptian woman named Anna would use tiny—also flannel—cutouts of biblical characters to painstakingly illustrate the story of Jesus raising Lazarus, walking on water, or feeding the five thousand. This was great because watching Anna stick the fuzzy characters to blue board taught me the basic stories of my faith. The unfortunate side effect was that after a while,...
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