Anyone who’s come over for dinner has seen my collection of Peruvian oil paintings of the Virgin Mary. Several years ago, a spending spree and newfound obsession with Catholic art (despite being a Reformed Baptist) landed me with a few too many Marys: three hanging in the hallway and one above my bed. Buyer’s remorse aside, they’re gorgeous. Several of them depict the virgin mother cradling the infant Jesus—a beautiful, visual reminder of the miracle […]
The Bible bursts the bonds of our hermeneutical strategies. The Scriptures as the medium of divine communication are what Karl Barth called a “free Bible”. This is good news: the canon imposes itself upon us readers, transgressing the procrustean bed we inevitably bring to the table as interpreters. For Barth this fact necessitates the development of a “free exegesis”, which means that “Bible exegesis should be left open on all sides” and that “self-defence against […]
Christmas is about destruction. It’s about crushing. It’s about the elimination of God’s enemies. Intrigued? Let’s see what Matthew says. And as we do, remember: there is more than one way to eliminate and enemy… In Mathew 2:2, we see Magi, likely Babylonian scientists and astronomers familiar with the Jewish scriptures from Judah’s exile, have come to pay homage to a newborn king, because “we saw his star when it rose and have come to […]
It’s always good to talk to the person next to you on an airplane flight. You never know, you just may end up sitting next to the developer of a new state-of-the-art Bible software. This very thing happened to me on my flight to Milwaukee for this year’s annual meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society. During the flight I got to have a brief chat with Nicholas Ellis who helped develop BibleMesh. Because we missed […]
I have been in a research program now for about two months. It has been both a rewarding and overwhelming experience. I imagine that most people who are involved in some sort of enormous research project spend a good amount of their time (often too much) figuring out not the actual problems of their project, but the problems associated with doing large projects in general. Along these lines, I think a lot about the best […]
Was Jesus always nice? OK, so it’s not the deepest theological question we’ve ever tackled here at The Two Cities. But it’s an important one. Because, above all, the world expects Christians to be nice. Forget about holiness, evangelism and social justice. Just be nice. But if Christians bear any resemblance to Christ (and we should), we won’t always be nice—at least not by man’s standard. Spend a little time with your Bible and you’ll […]
After his recent trip to Asia, it’s good to see our President (well, the US President, to be sensitive to our international readers) is back in time for the important parts of his job- namely, the Presidential Pardon of a Thanksgiving Day Turkey. This year, Cobbler and his pal Gobbler received “the nod” to be spared the axe this Thanksgiving, a deliverance celebrated and complete with a Presidential photo-op and the liberty to take a […]
On November 6th, Barack Obama was reelected faster than Thai food was delivered to my election night party. Though it is still obvious that our country is split down the middle, the election easily went to the Democratic Party. The people have spoken, and I think it’s time for Americans to accept this shift of American culture. So the question is, what does this mean for the Christian? This past week I saw many reactions […]
He approaches us at the Chevron station on the corner of Rosecrans and Sepulveda, where, on a clear day, you can see the skyscrapers of downtown L.A. cupped in the palm of the San Gabriel mountains, and overhead the planes queued up in the vast expanse of blue sky, waiting to land at LAX. Vinny, one of the kids I take care of, and I are having fun using the squeegee to clean the windows […]
Allow me to introduce myself. First and foremost, I’m a sinner saved by grace. I’m a husband and a father. I’ve been a youth leader, Sunday school teacher, deacon and elder. I served in the Air Force for thirty years. I was a three-sport letterman in high school, played college football, and played seven years of football overseas while in the Air Force. I like sports, action movies, being in control, and I would never […]
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