The New Testament’s Crooked Narrative Arc: In Part I last week, I began by noting that the New Testament is not entirely straightforward when it comes to the subject of faith, vocation and culture. Revelation says that in a certain era — the era in which actual Christians lived — there was a situation where...
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Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November of 2016. When I was a boy, my grandfather and I spent summers buying cattle throughout Colorado. Mostly of course, he was the buyer, but there were moments when, with a certain twinkle in his eye, he would let me be the bidder, nudging me to...
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Shadow and light. Watching the mysterious interplay between the sky and the grass, the trees and the flowers, I found myself thinking about the way shadow and light makes its way through life for every one of us. We live amidst both glories and ruins, all day long having to make sense of the very...
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“But did he hear their screams?” My wife Meg is named after two martyrs who lost their lives during the horrible “killing times” of Scotland in the 17th-century. Two Margarets, one an older woman and the other a girl, were staked in the bay as the tide came in, condemned to death for their refusal...
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Now, but not yet. Everyone everywhere, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve that we are, sees the same world, and tries to make sense. We don’t have to be philosophers to do that; in fact sometimes philosophers miss it badly. What is required is that we be human beings— ordinary men and women who...
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I hate this place. How is it possible to hate what you’re thankful for? I haven’t worked out all the details yet. Some questions are better after caffeine anyway, so I pour a cup of coffee so piping hot, it requires coursework in advanced thermodynamics. I sip with trepidation, a squint-eyed geologist exploring bitter...
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