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I love my Shakespeare, and I love relating what I teach to my students to the Gospel. Those of you who haven’t read Shakespeare will have to excuse me for indulging my passion for The Bard.
My AP English IV students just finished reading Shakespeare’s, “The Tempest.” The last few years, this play has risen in […]

For one last post on the issue of Christians and Antidepressants, I’ve asked former BHT fellow Mike Benoit to share his perspective from within the discipline of psychology.
Mike Benoit is finishing a Ph.D. dissertation in Counseling Psychology and looking for an academic position somewhere. His new venture is a podcast called Giving Psychology Away found […]

I’ve been involved in some good discussions recently on the role of subjective, personal spiritual experiences. How should we deal with personal experiences of God “speaking” or otherwise relating to Christians on the subjective levels of feeling and sensing? Because there is such abuse and misuse in this area, it’s very easy to create a […]

He became the reconciling place where opposites met. He was the meeting place of God and man. Man the aspiring and God the inspiring meet in Him. Heaven and earth came together and are forever reconciled. The material and the spiritual after their long divorce have in Him found their reconciliation. The natural and the […]

UPDATE: Here’s an excellent essay from Lawrence Perrine on the nature of “proof” in poetry. You should read it if you are interested in literary interpretation.
I’m sure some of you want me to blog on nothing but TRs, post-evangelicalism and the latest attempt to say that Mark Driscoll is Sam Kinison (I’m not making that […]

I don’t know what to feel as I read the story of the execution style shootings/murders of Amish girls in Pennsylvania. As part of a Christian school in a county where guns are everywhere, I’m frightened and I want to protect my students. As a Christian, I’m outraged that such things happen, and I’m concerned […]

Sometimes when I am interacting with other Christians, I’m overwhelmed with the feeling that I’m exchanging ideas with someone very, very different from myself in significant ways. I don’t insist that people be like me, and I don’t want to hold myself hostage for being different from other people. There is one difference, however, that’s […]

I get called a lot of names around the blogosphere. Everything from “pomo devil” to “respected blogger.” (Now there’s an oxymoron.) When you’re a “cage phase” blogger (there goes another one) you write long posts defending yourself and being outraged about this. For instance, my use of the name “truly reformed” used to bring about […]

Turning point.
Here’s what I recall. I was a relatively new Christian, already getting my feet wet sharing my faith, leading Bible studies and so forth. I was in that phase of nearly insatiable curiosity about the Bible. In my church, that meant total dependence on what you might learn from your pastor and any books […]

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4. Determine to be part of a community where the concept of leadership is fully New Testament in its understanding of the relation of clergy and laity, and is free from the exaggerated and harmful adoration/veneration of personalities so common in unhealthy groups.
How do you know that a community of Christians has […]

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3. Be honest: Does the logic of a group eventually conclude that other Christians are, in fact, not true believers at all?
The Arminian God is not “worshipable.” If you believe the doctrines of Arminius, you are idolater who hates God. If you give up your idolatry and embrace the God of the Bible, […]

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2. Be suspicious of guilt that comes from crossing the perceived boundaries of a group.
In between the lines of these epistles from young theologians, there is a common emotion. It is not a front-burner emotion, nor is it entirely absent. It is the emotion of nagging, background guilt. Guilt related to deviating from the […]

I’m fortunate to be trusted with many letters chronicling the spiritual journeys of some of my readers. Currently, I have several of these letters in my mailbox that I need to answer. I have a particular group, however, that are different from the norm; they are letters with several things in common:
-They are from young […]

Here are all six parts of the Mental Illness series so you can link them together. I’ve never done a series of this length before, and I enjoyed it. I hope to do some other series in the future.

I come to my last post in this series: What does the Gospel say to the mentally ill? What does it say to all human beings about the mentally ill? What does their presence among us tell us about ourselves? How is mental illness related to “true humanity?”