What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? In this episode, we gather for a post-Christmas, post-New Year pastoral debrief. We talk about symbols and meaning, Christmas and holidays, signs and seasons, and how modern churches quietly cleared the path for culture to push Christ out of Christmas without much resistance. We explore the strange and largely arbitrary ways the world measures time, along with the old Adam’s never-ending pyramid project. That is, his need to build meaning upward by effort, progress, and control rather than receive it as a gift. From there, we return to symbol and meaning. We ask why ancient liturgy’s nostalgia or ornamentation, but the distilled shape of reality itself, why the Lord’s Supper isn’t a side practice, but the beating heart of the Church, of worship, and of the Christian life. And why stories’ decorations for faith, but the way truth takes on flesh and finds us where we actually live. This is a conversation about time, worship, memory, and why the Church invents meaning but receives it again and again at the table.

Today on the Christian History Almanac, we remember the unveiling of what is, perhaps, the most famous altarpiece in history.

Weekend Edition for September 21-22, 2024

Weekend Edition for September 7-8, 2024

Day Trippin’. In this episode, we talk about Easter, altars, cosmic mountains, church history, open fonts, restored virtue, saints, angels, powers of darkness, idols, icons, images, searching for the truth, and how Jesus is the archetype of all archetypes, and in between we read Luther on the Old Testament by Heinrich Bornkamm.

Just My Imagination. In this episode, we read Eugene Peterson’s book, Under the Unpredictable Plant, and discuss theological imagination at length. What are the consequences when the church takes its cues from a culture with no imagination? Can Christians tell biblical stories without a theological imagination? What happens when the earthly and heavenly are divided by a lack of imagination into merely rationalized explanations?

We are excited to have Natasha Kennedy, illustrator for to a children's book on the Apostle's Creed, talking about communicating through illustrated theology.

We continue our discussion of the book "Everything Sad is Untrue" which then morphs into a discussion of communicating theological truths either through writing, art, or music.

While you are comparing your presents and life to others, pour a Sidecar, turn off the Taylor Swift, and man up.

It wasn’t a perfect image, but it was still there, even in its cartoonish movie magic distortion. It was an element of the Gospel right there in front of me.

The concept of Theology as science is foreign to our ‘enlightened’ century where the subject has been removed to the Liberal Arts category.