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Dear Media types. Main Stream. Television. Christian. Internet. Whatever. This post is for you.
It has come to my attention that, in the past decade, you have paid increasing amounts of attention to conservative Christianity in America. In particular, recently, since Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and the 2004 “Values Voter” presidential election, you […]

Information about Justice Sunday at Highview Baptist Chruch can be found at the Lexington Herald Leader. Baptist Press is covering the same story, with a Q&A as well. And for irony’s sake, this story is on the same page. More recent coverage is here. :-/
I’m pretty good at seeing connections. I took the Graduate Record […]

Q: Are you a Calvinist?
A. I prefer to not be called a Calvinist. There might be certain situations where I would answer to that term, but it would be rare.
Q. Why are you no longer a Calvinist?
A. As long as I have been a Calvinist, I’ve had to explain what the term meant when I […]

It’s major confession time. I have a TV habit. I think it started with the X-Files, which Denise and I started watching every week about the middle of its run. We watched and loved Millennium, and a short-lived series called Brimstone. We’ve always had at least one regular series we try to catch each week […]

In my AP English IV class, one of my most difficult tasks is teaching students how to read, think and analyze literature as Christians. There are several reasons for the resistance. Laziness. A feeling that the classics are irrelevant. Senioritis. (A very real disease) And one that concerns me most of all: the belief that […]

When it comes to ultimate reality and our humanity, there are really very few options.
If there is no God, there is no such thing as the “human” in the classically Judeo-Christian sense. There is an existential human, thrown into existence and forced to determine his own identity by choices that are, ultimately, absurd. There is […]

I’ve mentioned Thomas Merton recently. Merton is a continuing influence in my life as I try to live out a kind of “Christian Humanism” (a topic I need to return to more often.)
Merton’s idea of the spiritual life underwent a major change one afternoon in Louisville when he realized he was a member of the […]

My Calvinistic and Reformed friends. If we are still on speaking terms, I need to say something to you.
I am not like you. That’s not an attitude of condescension, it’s just a fact that I need to bring to the front of our relationship. You are writing me letters and notes about N.T. Wright, my […]

NOTE: This piece is similar to an essay on Catholicism I wrote two years ago, but the differences are significant. Read them both. There has been some evolution in the meantime. My apologies to the Catholic bashers who will get upset at this piece. Maybe you shouldn’t read it.
I was born in 1956, so when […]