This summer, America celebrated her 240th birthday. The Fourth of July has always been one of my favorite holidays, mostly because I love any excuse to eat my weight in watermelon and watch things explode, but this summer I spent most of the month of July in England. All “America-as-the-original-Brexit” jokes aside, I found it rather significant that on this particular 4th of July, I found myself in an 800 year old church in Cambridge […]
Lesslie Newbigin tells an illuminating story about his time as a foreign missionary to India. In the Hindu Ramakrishna monastery, there is a gallery of portraits of the great religious teachers of humankind. Among them is a portrait of Jesus at which worship is offered every Christmas Day. Lest anyone mistake this worship for a gesture toward conversion in India, Newbigin explains that this is simply “the co-option of Jesus into the Hindu worldview. Jesus […]
Okay, so I have not had nearly enough conversations about The Cursed Child. I really really need to vent about this story but I’ve just not had any opportunities. So instead of bottling it all up, I need to get a few more things off my chest about this story. A few weeks ago I gave my initial thoughts on the script (you can read that post here). Since writing that post I’ve had a […]
What is the local church? Not physically so much, but what is the point? I asked this question for years ever since I started going consistently of my own volition in my senior year of high-school. I really only went because I had friends there, and occasionally I’d hear an interesting point about some passage in Scripture or a funny story, but I mostly just went because it was just what you did as a […]
The Root Issue: Failure to Listen In my previous blog post, The Art of Listening, I discussed the important and wise lesson behind one of my favorite biblical versus—Proverbs 18:13: “He who gives an answer before he hears, it is folly and shame to him” (NASB). If you have not already done so, I highly recommend reading through that previous post as this topic is in many ways a continuation of that [all too common] […]
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” In our world and in our current political climate, it seems that there are more things that divide us than unite us. Our world is supremely broken up and […]
After studying under Biola’s apologetics program and then becoming a theology major there, I have felt the tension between the two fields. Apologetics sounds like theology but really feels like philosophy, whereas theology typically doesn’t sound or feel like either. After wondering whether my years of apologetics training were actually fruitless attempts to create an idol from human reason, as some of my fellow students suggested, or whether my theology training would leave me ill-prepared […]
In an impossibly unnerving Presidential election year, where no sensible choice seems possible for Christians, there emerges a tendency among Christians (and other morally like-minded people) to “choose life” and vote for Trump in the mode of the reluctant, single-issue voter. A recent example of this can be seen in Wayne Grudem’s recent controversial endorsement of Trump as the “morally good choice” for President. [1] Reviewing his essay again, it is clear to me that […]
So yesterday I read through “the eighth story” of the Harry Potter series: Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Since it has not been out for very long I will refrain from posting any considerable spoilers. Considering that this story is the script for a play that has been performed in London for several weeks already, I’m a bit surprised that it wasn’t spoiled for me already. I’m grateful for the #KeeptheSecrets movement, and in […]
My Favorite Proverb There is one particular biblical verse with which I have been infatuated for some time and which I have made a constant conscious commitment to follow. That verse goes a little something like this: “Ten cubits shall be the length of each board and one and a half cubits the width of each board…” No… no… wait. Hold on, that’s Exodus. That’s not it… let me see here… ah, yes. Okay – […]
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