Sorting by

×
Skip to main content

All Articles

Featured

Bearing Witness: A Journey to Unbelief

In some ways, it felt like evangelicalism ruined religion for me, and I don’t think I’m the only former evangelical to feel that way. I say evangelicalism ruined religion for me because it felt like I could no longer relate to any religious practice in a healthy way. After you’ve experienced religious trauma, it’s hard to trust Christians, even the nice ones. I couldn’t read the Bible or participate in any sort of religious service without feeling triggered and icky…
April 22, 2024
Featured

Sport and Religion

Ultimately, sport opens windows to transcendence. One can hardly watch Usain Bolt run the 100 meters, or Simone Biles do a floor exercises, or Caitlin Clark sink a three-pointer, or witness Jim Redmond supporting his injured son Derek across the finish line without recognizing that God is at work in an extraordinary way.
April 15, 2024
Featured

Christ’s Followers Are Not Culture Warriors

Lent and Easter remind me to have hope. Though the Crusades did horrible damage to people and to the name of Christ, they came to an end. Likewise, this present madness embarked on by culture warriors in America will end too. Just as God reminded Elijah that not all Israel bowed its knee to Baal, so also not all Christians in America embrace destructive, vigilante power. Some deny themselves, take up their crosses daily, follow Christ, and lay down their…
April 1, 2024
Featured

My Mother is in Hospice Care

Loss of memory can sometimes be a gift. I know it isn’t always, and I can imagine that there are plenty of counter examples, but as I sit with my mom and experience (for the ten-millionth time in my life) her love for me, I realize that there can be a kind of grace in not remembering a few things. It’s not denial; it’s choosing to remember her life as good. My mom wants to leave this world a grateful…
March 25, 2024
Featured

Of Giants and Waves

He always told me that the most important thing in working in a hot fight is to recognize that everybody wants to simplify the issues so you have clear reasons for killing each other (spiritually, of course, in most church conflicts). He said that the most important thing one can do is to “complexify things.”
March 18, 2024
Featured

Standing on the Word

Today, my ESV Bible is all marked up and highlighted, with copious marginalia. It is full of stars, exclamation points, hearts, WOWs and “thank yous.” Someone looking through it might think that my faith is superficial, that it lacks nuance and complexity. But I know the world of struggle that lay beneath each heart, each star, each exclamation point.
March 11, 2024
Featured

Footnotes to Fiction: Confessions of a Post-Pandemic Wannabe Novelist.

That I’d written a novel surprised people because I have a Ph.D. in American Culture Studies and for many years taught college courses and wrote nonfiction books about film and media. My day job kept me busy enough. (Maybe that’s why I lost sleep over whether to kill off my erudite professor character.) But I have this story I’ve always wanted to tell, and started carving out time to do some research, make notes, and organize material until I could…
March 4, 2024
Featured

Pentecost Sunday:  The Kingdom, Scripture, and Same Sex Marriage

The Bible is a historical book, thus requiring historical tools of analysis, the most basic of which is establishing the context for what is going on in the text. The Bible is also a literary book, thus requiring literary tools of analysis, like asking the genre of a text: a chronicle is not a poem, nor a first-person account, nor a letter of a specific church, nor an apocalypse. There is, in fact, no such thing as “quoting Scripture” with…
February 26, 2024
ChurchFeatured

How the RCA and CRC Differ

It is remarkable to me that the differences between the RCA and the CRC are epitomized by the names of their respective LGBTQA advocacy organizations. All One Body sounds idealistic, biblical, Pauline, seeking union, cohesion, and alignment, and suggesting “all for one and one for all.” By contrast, Room for All sounds looser, more practical, more eschatological, Lukan rather than Pauline, assuming multiplicity, variety, and space, and requiring the practice of embracing otherness. “All one body” trades on shared identity,…
February 19, 2024