I never really learned how to write until college. I mean I could write in high school, but I didn’t really understand how to respond to a topic or a piece of literature. I’m not sure why it clicked in college, maybe those freshmen english classes did work or maybe simply a couple of years [...]

Beauty. Art. Church. All things I have been thinking about for some years. For a long time I thought about them in very separate terms, then slowly the questions began to overlap and I started allowing them to dialogue with each other. Listening to questions about art and applying them to church or worries about [...]

I read a lot of books, some of them are really good, some not so much, some are informative or educational, but then some are just simply ruptures in thinking—this was what Dan Kimball‘s Emerging Worship was for me. It isn’t very new (published in 2004) and it isn’t a very complex or hard read [...]

{I continue my journey through John Caputo’s The Weakness of God.} The Weakness of God is divided into two parts. Part One is ‘The Weakness of God’, Part Two is ‘The Kingdom of God: Sketches of a Sacred Anarchy’. In between these two halves he has included what he calls a ‘Hermeneutical Interlude’. This interlude [...]

{I continue my thoughts on John Caputo’s The Weakness of God which started here.} There is a certain tension for me reading Caputo’s work. I really like a lot of what he says and the certain moves he is trying to make; maybe I have more modernists tendencies than I’ve realized but there are certain [...]

I feel conflicted with my response to Caputo’s work in general and I don’t think his book The Weakness of God will be an exception to that. I find his thinking to be very fresh and enlightening. The things he has taken from Derrida and spun into the theological conversation are extremely interesting. But it [...]

And to finish up A Confession Which Leads the Inward Man to Humility which is found in the anonymously written 19th century Russian story The Way of a Pilgrim: 4. I am full of pride and sensual self-love. All my actions confirm this. Seeing something good in myself, I want to bring it into view, or to [...]

Continuing A Confession Which Leads the Inward Man to Humility which is found in the anonymously written 19th century Russian story The Way of a Pilgrim:: 3. I have no religious belief. Neither in immortality nor in the gospel. If I were firmly persuaded and believed without doubt that beyond the grave lies eternal life and recompense for [...]

Continuing from A Confession Which Leads the Inward Man to Humility which is found in the anonymously written 19th century Russian story The Way of a Pilgrim:: 2. I do not love my neighbor either. For not only am I unable to make up my mind to lay down my life for his sake (according to the gospel), [...]

This comes from the anonymously written 19th century Russian story The Way of a Pilgrim. It reminded me of Peter Rollins’ “I don’t believe in the resurrection…” Though it doesn’t have the certain post-modernity outlook as Rollins is has the same reflection that my beliefs must lead to concrete actions in my life. I found [...]