I just came across an article about a male Gordon-Conwell student (the seminary I attended) who allegedly broke into a female student’s dorm room and setup a video camera with the intent of filming her.  You can read about it on the Boston Herald or the Salem News sites.  I feel badly for this young woman. [...]

“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 [...]

A new movie documentary, The Anatomy of Hate, is coming out that explores the origins and reasons for hate.  The film documents hate in the lives of people from white supremacists in the south, Christians who define themselves as anti-gay, to the Arab-Israeli conflict.  It looks fascinating.  As a pastor who believes deeply in community, [...]

These are possibly the most disturbing images I’ve seen regarding the Iraq war.  They aren’t grotesque.  They aren’t gory.  They aren’t gruesome.  But they are some of the most ridiculous appropriations of Bible texts I’ve ever seen.  Below is some of the article text, and here is the link to the slide show, which shows the images [...]

A sadly revealing survey has just been released that found evangelical Christians are the most likely group to support torture.   White evangelical Protestants were the religious group most likely to say torture is often or sometimes justified — more than six in 10 supported it. People unaffiliated with any religious organization were least likely [...]

This book is written to challenge churches to avoid become places filled with nice people, pastors, and purposes.  Too often in the American church landscape, the church co-opts the language and issues of the day and then simply rephrases them in Christian speak.  They don’t say anything too controversial or counter-cultural.  Willimon and Hauerwas challenge [...]

Norm MacDonald, former SNL weekend Update man, used to joke about which job was the worst in America. Every year the results would come in and the worst job would be something like: Assistant Crack Whore. Everyone would laugh because it’s the superlative of worst-ness in the vocational world. Joking aside, I believe this year’s [...]

A common Christian misconception that I’ve been fighting to overcome in my life has to do with the importance of ordinary, secular work. Over that past few years I’ve been working as a web developer, and before that I’ve worked as a computer engineer, IT helpdesk technician, and a 7th grade teacher. I wanted to [...]

Making big decisions has historically been a gut-wrenching experience for me. Instead of feeling liberated by the Christian truth that God promises to lead us, I feel burdened by it. The pressure of being certain about the will of God has weighed me down to the point of debilitation. The need to get it right [...]