Author: Matt Jenson
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Pietism—What Is It Good For?
It is a truth universally acknowledged (among theologians, or at least most of them), that a Christian in possession of a Pietistic spirituality, must be in want of a social ethic. Pietists, those champions of heart religion, those prototypes of today’s experience-driven religion, were so heavenly-minded they could not possibly have been of any earthly…
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The Best Gardener Ever
Recently, my church had a Kidz Camp. We were coming up on Easter and wanted to give the kids a sense of the truly weird thing that happened when God raised Jesus from the dead. I got to tell the story, complete with a talking Elmo doll that wouldn’t talk at first, and only did…
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A Letter to My Freshmen
To My Freshmen: Okay, so that may be premature. We’ve only just met, after all. Five months ago you were a sea of undifferentiated faces only loosely attached to names (but great names—names like Bustos and Magness, Tonti and Duarte, Mendelson, Zilka, and Van Vlear). To call you ‘my’ freshmen presupposes a kind of possession…
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Remembering 2010
‘My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time. ‘These memories, which are my life – for we possess nothing certainly except the past – were always with me. Like the pigeons of St. Mark’s, they were everywhere, under my feet, singly, in pairs, in little honey-voiced congregations,…
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The Coming Light
In Advent, we wait in the dark for the One who lights up the world. *** ‘God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.’ (1 John 1:5) ‘What fellowship has light with darkness?’ (2 Cor. 6:14) ‘In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and…
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Frederick Douglass Learns to Read
I’ve just finished reading the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Our seniors read it in the Torrey Honors Institute as part of a semester of books on America. Douglass’ is one of hundreds of slave narratives, narratives which played a key role in the abolition movement and offer a movingly…
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Anywhere But the Suburbs
There are occasional days when I heartily affirm with Randy Newman: ‘I love LA!’ More often, I hate it. On Tuesday morning I flew back to Los Angeles, with its cars and concrete, its hurry and hustle and hassle. I had been in the Southeast for two weeks – with good friends in Nashville and…
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What is the What: Sudan, Manute Bol and Activistic Art
Last week, Manute Bol died. The tallest and thinnest man in the NBA, he was a shot-blocker on stilts, an amusing presence, really, a trivia answer. He was also, it turns out, a very good man. Bol grew up in southern Sudan, a largely Christian region in an on-again, off-again civil war with the largely…
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12 Things to Do Now that You’re Graduating
I’ve been teaching in the Torrey Honors Institute for four years now, and nearly all of the students I have mentored over that time will be graduating in a few weeks. I still remember sitting in a circle of desks in the McNally buildings with a bunch of eager – and, okay, maybe a bit…
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19 Books on the Church
The last few years, I’ve been reading and writing on ecclesiology. It’s a funny topic, one capable of being at one moment dull, at the next incendiary. There’s plenty out there that merely re-hashes standard material and parses terms ever more finely. Here, though, are a few of my favorite reads – an idiosyncratic list,…
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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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Israel and Advent
Yesterday Joe and I were driving to Sports Authority in Cerritos. In the middle of catching one another up on our lives, he took a conversational detour to ask what I thought about Israel. It’s partly a political question, partly a spiritual one; it concerns at once Scripture, revelation, Jesus, the church and, of course,…