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 don’t hate the prosperity gospel. And you shouldn’t either. What we should hate is when it is taken out of context. If we look to the Old Testament (which is a favorite mining ground for such proofing texting) we often see passages which speak of the promises of God for our  personal prosperity and [...]

{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 [...]

So for Lent my faith community, Vintage Fellowship, decided to give up the technology related to our Sunday gatherings—this includes things like the projector, electric instruments, amplifiers, microphones, and the like. With this change we were able to do some unique things since we weren’t tethered to the power outlets. We moved things around in [...]

Here’s a collection of stuff related to vespers service as I know at least one or two of you will be interested in this stuff. For those who missed it, here’s a post introducing everything. Pictures and Video: Here is the media from the service. These pictures give a pretty good idea of how it [...]

For those who may not have heard, I am now officially an associate pastor at Vintage Fellowship. Well actually that isn’t my actual title, as we are still working one. ‘spiritual architect’ has been suggested; I like ‘practitioner in residence’ or something like ‘spiritual gardner’ but neither of us are sure about it. Though the whole idea [...]