Have you ever been annoyed when a spiritual guru has told you to do some self-exploration?  I think that’s fair.  There’s enough self-absorption in our country that when another Christian pastor or spiritual leader tells people to “look inward” or to “know thyself” that it sounds like New Age Narcissism.  Often times, Christians object to [...]

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” ~ Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
This, the opening line to Tolstoy’s novel, Anna Karenina, is packed full of meaning, and the rest of the book expounds in story form what he means.   We read of one miserable family owing its pain [...]

Mark Batterson loves Jesus.  I’ve now read two of his books, Wild Goose Chase and Primal, and the portrait I get of him is a high energy (possibly over-caffeinated, he started a coffee shop) Jesus junky.  He comes across as an adventurer in pursuit of new ways to articulate God’s love. And the good news [...]

Don Miller learns to live an exciting story.  That should be the subtitle to this book.  In the process of trying to turn his Blue Like Jazz book into a movie, he comes face-to-face with the reality that he is living a boring life.  He has to sit down with the movie producers and turn [...]

In this book Tim Keller offers his expanded interpretation of the parable most often referred to as the Prodigal Son.  He says that the two sons represent two types of people into which all of humanity divides.  Each of us falls into one of two categories.  The first is represented by the younger brother who [...]

At breakfast one morning, a wife looks at her husband as he reads the financial page of the newspaper, just as he has done every morning for the past twenty years.  She longs to yank away the paper and tell him she is just as in love with him today as she was the day [...]

Has anyone ever said that to you?  Has anyone ever seen the way you behaved and said, “Shame on you?”  This phrase implies there is something wrong with you just because you made a mistake or did something wrong.  By saying shame on you, the message you hear is you are a worse person because [...]

In this interesting book, Lamin Sanneh explores the nature of expanding world Christianity.  Sanneh explains how missionaries, who first took the gospel to non-western contexts in places like Africa, brought more than just Christianity.  Their efforts to educate peoples in the ways of Christianity’s God were done in conjunction with attempts to educate them in [...]

In the book The Myth of a Christian Religion, Greg Boyd explores what he understands to be the true calling of the church and the ways religion often gets in the way.  He argues that the true calling of the church is to represent and proclaim the Kingdom of God, which he defines as:
the Kingdom of [...]

Even almost sociopathic narcissism feels right at home on My Super Sweet 16.  Atlanta teen Allison tells a party planner she wants to block off part of Peachtree Street so there can be a parade for “my grand entrance.”  Peachtree is a major thoroughfare, the planner reminds her.  She responds, “My sweet 16 is more [...]