Christ, The Word, The Church, The Republic
If you thought the Old Testament was scary, take another look at the New One.. Mob stories on television don’t bother me. They reassure me. I look at the lives of Tony Soprano or Ray Donovan, and I think, “I’m a buttoned-up Mennonite by comparison.” When someone asked me if crime drama frightened me, I..
Easter, Roundabout In a few weeks, Lord willing, my wife and I will take a first class vacation across the country in celebration of being married thirty years. I look forward to this, inordinately, in much the same way I looked forward to school starting in the fifth grade, and the yearly ritual of new..
Startling Simplicity I tend to superficially over-think religious subjects. I say “superficially” because my attorney friend, Tom Eastmond, reminded me about David Hume’s “is-ought” problem, and when you get under the hood with the metaphysical uber-thinkers, it humbles you. You get that “nothing new under the sun” feeling. Someone has already seen this here thing…
Seeing Through The Clutter So, in this no-man’s land between Christmas and our official re-awakening of commerce—about one week after New Year’s—I’ve been swimming through a rich sea of YouTube documentaries. It’s an impossibly large feast; it’s like being being tossed around by a huge school of Atlantic Cod, two minutes with a fork in..
Which Cable Gets you to Heaven? I spent my 58th birthday organizing my USB cables and engaging, half-heartedly, in a theological debate on Facebook. I wasn’t “all in,” because you get the sense, sometimes, that some fellow believers just don’t share the same assumptions, even remotely, about the faith, and so there is very little..
The Man of “Science” I took a call years ago from one of my father’s business friends. We had Stanford in common; he had graduated a few decades before and his daughter was on her way there at the time. I recognized, in his voice, a kind of nerdy, technical view of the world. I..
I try to start my day in an ancient text. I scold myself if my mind wanders, because I’m trying to treat it with at least the reverence I give Scottish shortbread. I’m trying to savor the stuff—even when the words feel dry and tasteless. The point isn’t just to read, but to think, and..
Wormwood Imagine you’re a small boy and two men from the government let your mother know your father has had an accident. He fell, or jumped, out of a 13th story hotel room in New York. It is 1953 and your father is a germ warfare scientist. Over the rest of your life, you will..
“..come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control…” I’m blessed not only with a good wife, who has abiding contempt for feminism, but lots of female friends who hold toxic man-hatred in contempt as well. This is more or less a planned reality on my part, because..
Dominion Over the years, I’ve been very hard on quite a few pastors. I see no reason to stop. My children and grandchildren will have to live in the world they don’t care about, the world they claim—with so much ill considered theology—to have left behind for their citizenship in heaven. To be short, blunt, and..
