Going Global
For about a year now, I haven’t posted all that often on the ‘ol bloggerino. Some of that was because I had just moved and was settling into a new job (which I wrote about here), some of it was because I just had a son (which ironically was a couple days before the entry…
Birthdays in Job?
I hadn’t thought a lot about birthdays and the Bible. I had heard some vague rumblings that birthdays were a pagan custom that was imported to the faith at a relatively late date and I uncritically accepted that and moved on. Imagine my surprise when I got to John Calvin’s eleventh sermon on Job and…
Translation and the Gospel
A few years back, I read a really helpful article by a sociologist about different cultural communication styles. Communicational norms were rated on two axes: direct-indirect and formal-informal. The first axis (formal-informal) is mostly about structure. Formal communication involves certain levels of decorum, contains some form of hierarchy, and moves at a slower pace. Informal…
Engaging Existentialism with Sartre
People tend not to give their ideological opposition fair representation in arguments. I remember a VERY Methodist professor at Duke Divinity School that would rail against Calvinism on a weekly basis. I’m not sure most of the students in his class knew what Calvinists really were, but that didn’t stop him from explaining why they…
Beyond the Mundane: William Carlos Williams and John Heath-Stubbs
A friend and I have a standing engagement to read poetry together and judge which poet is better (using the very precise metric of whatever we happen to enjoy in a given week). Each week, we each pick a new poet to do battle. Not that there’s any sense of competitiveness. We often pick poets…
Christian Whimsy
This is a brief departure from my current series. I’ve been chipping away at the fundamentalist/modernist debates, but this came up and it was too fun not to write about. I don’t know that Christianity is usually associated with whimsy. Sure, you have your happy-clappy Christians that play guitar while they sing who are a…
One Point Per Parable: Julicher is Overrated
I knew a pastor that used to preach that every parable had precisely one meaning. They never explained why that was the case. Of course, making declarations like that from the pulpit isn’t uncommon. Pastors have a terrible habit of just kind of declaring that their school of thought is self-evident and there’s no other…
The Flight of Gregory Nazianzen and the Challenge of New Beginnings
It’s been ages since I last posted. Life has been crazy. I’ve gone from being the associate pastor at Bexley UMC to the pastor at The Plains UMC. I moved about an hour and a half south for the new position and, right now, all of my life is in boxes. Needless to say, I’ve…
God is Red: Zhang Yinxian and True Discipleship
Back when I was first trying to find good books about Christianity, I went to my local library and grabbed whatever was on the shelves. One of those books happened to be Liao Yiwu’s God is Red, a series of interviews with people who endured persecution in communist China around the time of the Cultural…
An Odd Mix of Joy and Sorrow: Christ Jesus Lay in Death’s Strong Bands
A few weeks back, I wrapped up a class about hymns at the church. We looked back at how music was used in worship throughout the ages and looked at some particularly famous hymns along the way. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, we used the book Then Sings My Soul: Book 3…
Loading…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Follow My Blog
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Classic Theology 