• The American “brand”

    “Protestant Christians set out to make America Christian and ended up making Christianity American.” – Stanley Hauerwas But, as we Americans know… we take something and improve it anyway!

  • Key life questions

    I am reminded of key questions to keep in front of me from Dallas Willard: What is real? What is the good life? Who is a good person? How does one become a good person?

  • The problem of “bully” politics

    What can be learned from this history? There was for many of us in the mid-2010s a profound sense that something was missing in our common life in America. Material abundance seemed, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned, inextricably bound up with spiritual poverty. The false human story told by many progressives and conservatives alike in the years since Reagan, a story built…

  • Resisting powers need not be violent

    A 2023 study from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics found that 40 percent of both Biden and Trump supporters “at least somewhat believed the other side had become so extreme that it is acceptable to use violence to prevent them from achieving their goals.” 

  • The natural and supernatural of human existence

    There is a paradox that lies in the very heart of human existence. It must be apprehended before any lasting happiness is possible in the soul of a man. The paradox is this: man’s nature, by itself, can do little or nothing to settle his most important problems. If we allow nothing but our natures, our own philosophies, our own…

  • Regaining spiritual equilibrium

    In a crazy time, I have needed to work harder on what input I allow into my life. It also allows me to reflect on places in Scripture I deeply and are life-giving to me nearly every time I walk through the. Over the past few decades of my life, if there I could pick two, it would be Ephesians…

  • The city of God

    I have been working my way slowly through Christopher Watkins book, Biblical Critical Theory. It is a brilliant work and one I can’t simply “dive into.” It’s been an incredibly slow walk… and I’m not even halfway through.

  • Good morning, internet world! At what am I to be offended about today?

    We are a gullible culture. All of us. It’s easy to poke fun at conservative Christians (and part of it is a critique of my own tribe), and when I say “everyone” then there are those who say, “SEE! You are into both sideism! Or, whataboutism !” (So, there… you can be offended about that today.) But it comes to…

  • The bravery and anxiety of closing a church

    Then I told them once more, “Go in peace to love and serve your neighbors.” I know that I may never see some of those people ever again.