Confession isn’t a detour in the liturgy. It’s the doorway.
American religion did not become optional because the gospel failed. It became optional because religion slowly redefined itself around usefulness.
The Passover wasn’t just Israel’s story; it’s ours.

All Articles

Have you ever watched The Matrix? Crazy movie, right? The thing that continually keeps reminding me of that movie is the last thing you’d probably think of, even though the movie is rife with motifs, themes, and analogies of it.
Today, however, it seems that apologetics tends to be a performance rather than an authentic dialog, an exercise in being clever rather than being compelling, and a source of self-satisfaction rather than an invitation to risky but respectful engagement.
It’s like I’m eavesdropping on the two friends and the stranger who walks with them. Something about the way they hang their heads, something about the desperation in their voices, and certainly something about the stranger, has me grasping hold of every word as if gold is spilling from their lips.
I’ve always been taken aback by how much apologetic ink is spilled over understanding Genesis in the light of contemporary science, usually evolutionary biology.
That’s what I mean when I say that I’ve struggled with atheism. And still do. The suffering me becomes the questioning me who becomes the doubting me who becoming the unbelieving me.
Yes, I pray, but it is the Spirit who prays for me, in me, through me. I no more make up my own prayers than I made up the English language.
I know it’s a rite of pious holiday passage to complain about the commercialization of Christmas and to remind everyone to keep the “Christ” in Christmas. And don’t forget the secular “war on Christmas." Whatever.
As God is prone to do, He sometimes shows us who He is through people whom we would never think of as teachers, much less imitators of God.
The 21st century is simply not compatible with a reformational mindset. Daniel Dennett argues in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) that conservative Christians better serve their secular neighbors as specimens in a cultural zoo, relics of a bygone world.
Every child builds. Some build castles out of wooden blocks handed down from an older sibling. Some construct forts out of blankets, chairs, and miscellaneous living room artifacts.
As with so many things, regret can begin as something natural, even beneficial, as you struggle to recover from a wound in your past. But over time, regret can devolve from a sadness to a sickness.
Over time, any inclination the cupbearer might have to speak a good word to Pharaoh on Joseph’s behalf will seem less and less of a moral necessity.