Category: Uncategorized

I was in the eighth grade when I first encountered competing historical narratives. I had just moved to the United States from Canada, and in my US History class we were taught about the War of 1812, or as our history book called it, “The Second Revolutionary War”. I learned that, like the first revolutionary…

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I don’t know how it is for everyone else, but there are books that stick with me in a way that I find I am returning back to their ideas over and over again years after I’ve read it. One of those books for me is ‘The Civil War as a Theological Crisis’ by Mark…

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Every now and again I’ll come across and article or a book that becomes an apocalypse for me, in the sense that it reveals something, a paradigm or a cultural phenomenon, and the world around me makes a little more sense. Terry Gross’s interview of Quentin Tarantino on Fresh Air was one of those moments…

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In the introduction to Jesus through the Centuries, Jaroslav Pelikan writes: “For each age, the life and teachings of Jesus represented an answer (or, more often the answer) to the most fundamental questions of human existence and of human destiny, and it was to the figure of Jesus as set forth in the Gospels that…

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Revoicees (Revoicers? Revoicians?) I chose to come to Revoice this year to learn. I’m a straight, married pastor who wanted to hear from and better understand my gay brothers and sisters. I wanted to learn how I can be a better pastor to sexual minorities, and I expected to leave the conference with all kinds…

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I’m slowly working through my friend Scott’s “Questions to pose to a candidate being asked to serve as an elder in a local church.” Here is his second question: Tell me about five websites that you regularly visit in an average week. Why do you visit these sites? Here are the sites that I follow…

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(Also Posted on Christianity Today’s website on March 26th) (I have to note that what I’m writing is my own opinion, not the position of any institution with which I am affiliated. Anyone who knows anything about institutions with which I am affiliated should find this to be obvious, given the diversity of opinions in…

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The very first Sunday School series I taught upon becoming a youth pastor was through the book of Judges, and ever since then if you are one of my students, a parent of a student, or anyone else who has simply been in the right (wrong?) place at the right time, you’ve heard my rant…

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If you are around conservatives enough, you‘ll often hear some variation on this theme: The family is the building block of society. Or, in religious circles you might hear that the family (by this we mean the nuclear family of mother, father, and children) is like a little church. It comes up in politics, in…

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In Ohio public schools (at least in the late 90s), there were a series of tests you had to pass at the end of the Eighth grade. I wasn’t worried about showing competency in math or English, but I was worried about social studies, or as the test was called: “citizenship.” I had just moved…

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