The lectionary text for October 4, 2015: [Read more…]
Odell Beckham Can Teach Us How to Pray
Robert Sabo/New York Daily News
Odell Beckham shocked everyone with his one-handed catch heard around the world.
Most of the conversation about that catch made it sound like it was either a stroke of magnificent luck or the feat of a superhuman god of professional football.
I think it was a great expression of freedom. [Read more…]
Why We Need to Wait for Christmas
A few weeks ago, in the middle of October, my five-year-old son and I walked into a store together. He pointed and called my name with a disgust that kiddos usually reserve for carrots and squash.
“What buddy?”
“They have Christmas stuff up and we haven’t even had Halloween!”
When the young ones get it then we surely have a problem.
One Young Woman’s Efforts to Help Trafficking Victims
One of the greatest joys of pastoral ministry is seeing the amazing ways that people respond to God’s move in their lives. We have a committed group of students working to raise awareness about human trafficking and to fight back against the injustice. Katie Mehrlich is a sophomore student leader in that organization. She is also insanely talented as a worship leader and song writer, and she leads a Bible study on campus for other students through CRU. I asked her recently to tell people about what she is doing now to make a difference for trafficking victims. Are You Being Colonized by Liberalism?
Photo: David Shankbone
Bill Maher and Ben Affleck got into a heated exchange this weekend that is actually really helpful for understanding a key issue that is important to religious persons: To what extent can liberalism critique religious ethics and theology?
From Private Ownership to Christian Stewardship
When I write in critique of the seemingly perpetual need to accumulate that dominates the Western mentality, I am still surprised how many God-loving and faithful Christians are convinced that this is only a concern of Godless communists. I’m fully aware of the ways that contemporary politics have controlled the concerns of Christians on the left and the right. Parsing out which policies to support from the various partisan options is difficult work. It is common for Christians in America that defend traditional notions of marriage and pro-life policies to also find themselves defending economic policies that put the poorest and most vulnerable citizens at risk for the sake of economic production. How are we supposed to make sense of Christian men and women that defend the accumulation of wealth as a biblical ideal?
When Blogging Becomes Sinful
Maybe I am becoming the negative and divisive person that I so dislike as representative of Christianity. It seems like there is an occasion every couple months that Mark Driscoll infuriates me to an inch of losing my Christianity. It happened again this week- and he isn’t even active in the blogosphere right now- as some folks uncovered some heinous things he said 14 years ago. I suppose that he has become something of a punching bag for me as he rants ridiculously and his blogging group of neo-peep followers applaud him for it.
Dr. Jeremiah Gibbs 