Category: Writing

  • Dan

    The unreality of religion

    I have been revisiting J.I. Packer’s classic, Knowing God. It is refreshing moving through this book and finding gems to pull out. There are morsels to chew on. One of his last chapters is a bit harsher. It blasts away at the weakness of western Christianity. We have truncated the gospel and promised people the “good stuff” and minimized the…

  • Dan

    I write for the church

    I am beginning to flesh out my book more. The working title is What Happened to My Church? Holding Onto Your Spiritual Family Without Tossing Out Your Faith. The intimidation factor is great. What do I have to say? What do I have to add? How do I write so I don’t sound angry or bitter and have no solutions?…

  • Dan

    Looking back…

    I put this up again because the problem remains the same. We live in fear. We vote in fear. We lose sight of the Kingdom of God. We have a spiritual poverty that is deeply harming American Christianity. I hope to write a book soon chronicling our time and struggles. Join me in the journey. Reach out to me. Disagree…

  • Dan

    Week 17: The affections of Christ and JOY

    Some thoughts from NT Wright regarding the end of Matthew 6: Has it ever struck you what a basically happy person Jesus was?

  • Dan

    Week 16: The affections of Christ clash with my desire to retaliate

    I have been drawn back into the Sermon on the Mount. Reading it, I hear the voice of Dallas Willard. It takes me a long time to move through the Sermon anymore because I feel like when it’s over I quit hearing Dallas as much.

  • Dan

    Week 15: The Affections of Christ Over Ideologies

    Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation wrote this: “A revolution is supposed to be a change that turns everything completely around. But the ideology of political revolution will never change anything except appearances.”

  • Dan

    Week 14: The affections of Christ can save us from culture wars

    John 13:34–35 (CEB) 34 “I give you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, so you also must love each other. 35 This is how everyone will know that you are my disciples, when you love each other.” We seem to want culture wars, so I’m not sure this post will mean anything to a lot of…

  • Dan

    Week 13: The Affections of Christ and Rising to the Call

    “Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man the or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of…

  • Dan

    Week 12: The Affections of Christ and Silence

    This quote from Thomas Merton is incredibly wise… and hard. Do everything you can to avoid the noise and the business of men. Keep as far away as you can from the places where they gather to cheat and insult one another, to exploit one another, to laugh at one another, or to mock one another with their false gestures…

  • Dan

    The synchronicity of God’s love

    Synchronicity is a concept coined by Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung in the 1950s to describe meaningful coincidences that appear to have no causal connection.