God of Science

Listening to an NPR piece this week about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) that is about to re-open.  During the report, someone speculated that the LHC  might show scientists some dark matter.
In case you don’t know what dark matter is, it is the God of Science.  By this I mean that dark matter is what [...]

Historical Fiction

Visiting with a young man the other day, I heard a brief statement that pinpointed a terrible problem faced by much of American Christianity.
“Jesus was born on the cross for our sins,” he told me.
Well, not exactly.  Jesus was born.  Jesus did die on a cross.  Both these events took place as part of God’s [...]

Don’t Threaten Your Problem with Me!

Please leave me and mine out of your issues.  Unless, of course, we belong there.

Wesley, our cat, has been a bit under the weather lately.  Actually, I think Rachel has figured out that Wesley and I have about the same allergies.
We took Wesley to the Vet’s office last Friday, to get direction on dealing with [...]

Finding Identity-Thinking Ethnically

I have trouble dealing with ethnicity. It isn’t that I have trouble dealing with people who have an ethnicity. No, my problem, like that of very many of us, is that Anglo-Americans have generally grown up without any ethnicity. In fact, I would argue that the American Myth is that the only identity or ethnicity [...]

We’re all Users

I’m reading Bill Cosby and Alvin Poussaint’s Come on People: on the path from Victims to Victors. On p. 32 they write:
One way slaves survived such brutal conditions was to turn the Christianity they had learned into a liberation theology.  The stories of the Hebrew slaves became their own. Even as slave owners used the [...]

We Are Missing the Point

“I hope I won’t go to hell for that,” said the teenager.
It broke my heart to hear this young woman who has grown up in the church, who is a leader and who, in all she says and does seems to “get it” still wonders in her heart if she will end up in hell.
Grace.
Jesus [...]

Questions or Answers?

It seems common in circles I move in these days for people/leaders/teachers to say things like “We don’t have answers, we just want to encourage questions.”
I respectfully disagree.
Not in the way I disagreed in my fundamentalist days (which was often not respectful), but I must disagree nonetheless.
I can’t won’t, and shouldn’t promise young people, or [...]

Heaven: How do you imagine it?

What is heaven like?We all have our ideas.  What are yours?
Sometimes I speak before I think.  Sometimes this happens when I’m preaching. Ordinarily I’ve got a pretty strict plan for my message, but it is not unusual for me to let something sneak in at  the last minute.
A couple of Sundays ago I opened my [...]

So THAT’S the Problem?

This is from a letter to the editor in today’s Waco Tribune-Herald. I am NOT making this up.
All of my friends believe in God, and I believe that, as a country, we need to get back to living by the Ten Commandments, loving one another, and having respect for all.
This is one of those times [...]

I don’t think so

In case you can’t read the words in the image next to this, it says:
Men use duct tape to fix all kinds of things.  God uses His Son. ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.’ John 3:16
While I am tempted to call this Jesus Junk and move on, [...]