Category: Theology
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In the Garden Alone
My church hosted a great event last week, an Easter walk with a multi-station dramatic telling of the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection. It helped set up our congregational experience of Holy Week, and the church also produced and handed out two small devotional booklets for daily readings to do through the week. One…
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What Rob Bells Talks About When He Talks About God
Rob Bell’s new book just came out. In its title, borrowed from one of Raymond Carver’s short story collections, Bell promises to lay bare What We Talk About When We Talk About God. Carver’s quietly aching scenes of love, or perhaps more of the reality of failed and blocked and misconstrued gestures towards intimacy that pass…
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Celebrating in the Desert
One thing I learned late, growing up in my evangelical Christian community, was the rhythm of the church calendar. It always struck me as a little odd, when I was a kid, that we would interrupt our regularly scheduled sermon series on a Pauline epistle for a three-day celebration of our Lord’s death and resurrection.…
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Theological Atomic Physicists and their Simplifiers
This is a cartoon that was circulated in grad school. I’ve seen it published a few times but don’t know who to credit it to. The captions sound like some sort of Teutonic Latin: “Theologischer Atomphysiker” means “theological atomic physicist,” while “multiplikatoren” and “simplifikatoren” are “multipliers” and “simplifiers.” Then the punch line is in English:…
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St. Patrick Comics & Stories!
The cartoon adventures of St. Patrick, from a 1947 comic book called Treasure Chest of Fun & Fact. This four-page adventure by George F. Foley tells the saint’s story in a way designed to hold the interest of a young Roman Catholic audience in the USA at midcentury. Treasure Chest is on my list of Top…
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Quoth Francis & Francis: Speak Up!
In his first mass as Roman pontiff, Pope Francis delivered a short sermon in the Sistine Chapel in the presence of the cardinals. The sermon was in Italian rather than Latin, and even the Italian was kind of chatty in places (“non parliamo di Croce. Questo non c’entra,” he has the hapless Peter say: “Let’s not…
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Hebrews: The Mind-blowing Finale
The book of Hebrews is the grand finale of the first semester in the Torrey Honors Institute. After the freshman fall, the curriculums for Torrey’s two houses take their separate ways: the Morgan House following a roughly chronological path to bring them up to the twentieth century in senior spring and the Johnson House dwelling…
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The Cow is Happy; Not So the Fish
Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact was a Roman Catholic comic book that ran every two weeks from 1946 to 1972, and contained a little bit of everything. Here are two panels from a Lent feature. Treasure Chest generated so much content that it was bound to be uneven. This particular story is striking, I…
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Pictographic Catechism from the Andes
It’s not exactly a comic book, but there is an old catechism that certainly makes an interesting use of sequential images for the purposes of teaching Christian doctrine. The Huntington Free Library in the Bronx published a facsimile edition of a “pictographic Quechua catechism” that is a wonderful and engaging little booklet. Here is the page…
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Evangelism with Dempfey and Theo
This is a gospel tract I designed, an evangelism tool. Well, it’s not so much an evangelism tool as a “how to think well about evangelism” tool, not to be used in presenting the gospel but instead to be used as a spur to think through the dynamics of evangelism. It was originally printed as…
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What Stephen Saw, We Hear
At the very beginning of the Christian church, before it was ever called “Christian” or often called “church,” it was a large group of new believers in Jesus gathered in Jerusalem, figuring things out as they went along. They were learning how to be disciples of a Lord who, having ascended into heaven, could no…
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Three Vintage Posts on Hebrews
As I launch into a semester of teaching Hebrews and a year of hearing it preached, I wanted to exhume these 3 Scriptorium posts I wrote in late 2010, the last time I taught a class on the book. By the way, the little title logo I made for this series takes the first page…