Giving Advice

I am in a sometimes awkward position of having an adolescent child while I work with a couple hundred adolescents.
Professionally, I think I am pretty good at what I do.  I have the skills, the passion, and the dedication to keep me level-headed (for the most part) and consistent. I communicate well with adolescents (generally); [...]

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 [...]

Maybe Jesus was a carpenter…

We went around the table, each of us sharing something we got from the devotional that had just been read.  Toward the end, most of us settled into repeating something like: “Take your problems to God; God can solve any problem.”
The final girl said, almost under her breath, “God can’t solve every problem.”
Without thinking, almost [...]

Blame

It is NOT my fault.  I didn’t get the email.
Wasn’t that someone else’s responsibility?
If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell,* to the unquenchable fire.* 45And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut [...]

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 [...]

Control

When I get up earlier than Rachel, as I have this morning, I shut doors between the end of the house where she is sleeping and the end of the house where Wesley (our cat) and I are up and around.
Wesley doesn’t like this.  He complains.
So, in a long tradition of anthropomorphizing, I try to [...]

Commercializing Ministry?

Some of the bloggers I follow have moved their blogs to beliefnet. This includes Ben Witherington, Scot McKnight,  Tony Jones, and others. I don’t know te motivations, or variety thereof, behind signing on with beliefnet.
But I do know this: everytime I go to a beliefnet.com blog, I get an ad that opens down over the [...]

Warning for Youth Ministers

Responsibility is a booger.
A youth shared with me that he “could teach anyone here a lot about religion,” but that he no longer considers himself a Christian.
Here’s the short version of his story about why he is now an “agnostic” (his term).  He grew up going to church, and the church had trouble keeping a [...]

THE Christian view on Health Care in America?

I’ve heard and read this several places, so I won’t cite one particular source here, but this seems to me to be the best question for someone (Christian) to ask concerning health care in the United States:

“Does my neighbor
have reasonable access
to adequate health care?”

If the next thing that comes to your mind is “Who is [...]