Year: 2010
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Found Poem: Wrong Way — Right Way
Wrong Way — Right Way Air An Invitation A Paycheck Hell Sinners All The World What Death Is Rejecting Ignoring A Stopped Watch All-Seeing “Be Ye Ready” Heaven No Savior Substitute An Anchor My Glasses Dark Glasses A Grade Book A Love Letter Mosquito Bites The Shadow How To Eat Necessary Parts Safe Keeping Clean…
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Scott Bessenecker on Leadership
I just finished reading Scott Bessenecker’s new book How to Inherit the Earth: Submitting Ourselves to a Servant Savior (InterVarsity Press, 2009). Overall it was a good book, easy to read and understand. According to Bessenecker, most leaders in today’s church have bought into the “MONOPOLY” mindset of leadership. Simply put that means most leaders…
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“We’re on a mission from God.”
In the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers, Dan Akroyd deadpans: “We’re on a mission from God.” He and his partner are in the process of putting their band back together and are enlisting an old bandmate, and Akroyd’s character flatly insists that the divine origin of their project is sufficient warrant for the man to…
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What are We Preparing For? (Lessons from Justin Key)
Here at the beginning of a new academic semester, all the students and professors are full of big plans. We’re going to cover so much material, learn so many new skills, and develop so many relationships. We’ve got a long semester ahead of us, and since it’s a Spring semester, there’s a big graduation at…
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Three Reasons to Write Out Your Ideas Now
Three authors who knew a lot more when they were older, but were glad they had written their books when they were younger: John Wesley: “Nay, I know not that I can write a better on The Circumcision of the Heart than I did five and forty years ago.” C. H. Dodd in 1958: “I have…
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Plato for Pleasure
Hey, everybody, Plato is fun! Everybody ought to read him! Yay Plato! That, at least, is the argument of Adam Fox in his 1945 book Plato for Pleasure (revised edtion 1962). “The works of Plato have generally been in the hands of philosophers and scholars when they ought to have been in the hands of…
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Menand: Uncommonly Successful in Keeping the Felicities of Prose
I just finished a very fast read-through (with permission to skip some sections) of Louis Menand’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2001 book The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. It’s a 500-page book about one school of American philosophy. I picked it up used and have had it on the shelf for a few years,…
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Making the Most of The Shack
How should a theologian respond to a popular book that includes unsound teaching? The popular book I’m thinking of is The Shack, by William P. Young. After getting dozens of questions about The Shack, I wrote a review of it in early 2009. Actually, I wrote five reviews of it, in five different voices, partly…
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Sleep Talkin’ Theologian 4: “Translucent in Honor, Suspended in Dignity.”
And here is the epic conclusion to my sleep-talking adventures from graduate school. (Click here for installments 1, 2, and 3.) I’m sure I still talk in my sleep, but probably not as much as back in the day. During the time my wife took these notes, I was reading assigned theology all day every…
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Sleep Talkin’ Theologian 3: “Like a Light Beam In A Hallway.”
Installment 3 of 4 in this series of transcripts of my sleep-talking adventures from the late 90s. No, I cannot explain most of these. *** Something about a surgeon Getting ready to cut something out of someone [who?] Part of the time it was me. Part of the time it was some guy I didn’t…
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Sleep Talkin’ Theologian 2: “Looks Like Birds But It’s Really An Angel.”
Transcript 2 of 4 in the annals of the sleep-talkin’ theologian. These notes date from about 1997. My long-suffering wife, a morning person, asks me questions like “when do you want to wake up?” and “what are you dreaming about?” Still asleep, I answer her questions. Sometimes she interjects ideas into my dreams, and I…
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Sleep Talkin’ Theologian: “How Long Will Ye Linger Between Two Cabinets?”
There’s a man in England, Adam Lennard, who talks in his sleep. He speaks very clearly, says truly bizarre things, and is recorded by his wife’s voice-activated digital recorder. His wife has begun blogging his nightly oracles, and their blog is suddenly the Next Big Thing: millions of readers, interviews on talk shows, merchandise, the…