Years ago on a trip around the world I took a train up from Rome to Pisa. Why? To see and to ascend the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I enjoyed the experience and smiled at one odd feature: the keepers of the tower had installed protective rails on several levels of the tower on the *high* side (no danger), but on the low side where I felt a frisson of fear that I might actually fall, no bars. I stayed close to the tower wall, hoping not to become a news story. Odd, but overall it was a wonderful experience.

Afterwards I fell into conversation with a native citizen who expressed his anger and shame at this leaning tower. To him the lean was a scandal for Pisa and Italy, he exclaimed hotly. He was part of a group that was studying the feasibility of a massive effort to remedy partially the problem. I say partially because the tower had been built in stages, the latter ones attempting to correct the lean that had already begun. Read more

Forgiveness in Hollywood? by Joel Pelsue

Joel Pelsue
Founder/ Pres. Arts & Entertainment Ministries
Los Angeles, CA.
www.A-E-M.org

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How do you ask a room full of executives, actors, writers and producers expecting humor to forgive someone of an offense? That was exactly what happened recently at the Cinematheque Award Ceremony when Robert Downey Jr. received the prestigious honor.Read more

I first posted a version of this in August of 2008. Beautiful truth like the riches of the Gospel merit repeated display.
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My small group in Austin started studying through the Sonship curriculum in June of 2007, mostly meeting every two weeks, and we finished late this spring. The late Jack Miller founded World Harvest Mission and directed the development of the Sonship perspective. Sonship enfolds many things, including a relentless exposure of the idols we worship, an explication of what it looks like to live as “an orphan” and what it looks like to live as an adopted son or daughter of God.Read more

This is the fourth and final installment of my interview with Justin Holcomb, who wrote Rid of My Disgrace with his wife, Lindsey.

Please note: Justin and Crossway (the publisher) are making a chapter of the book available for free to Common Grounds Online readers.

To buy the book, Rid of My Disgrace, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20

For Part 1 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-abuse-and-gospel-interview...

For Part 2 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-assault-and-gospel-intervi...

For Part 3 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-assault-and-gospel-intervi...

For more on Justin Holcomb:
http://theresurgence.com/authors/justin-holcomb
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This is Part 3 of my interview with Justin Holcomb, who wrote Rid of My Disgrace with his wife, Lindsey.

Justin earned his PhD at Emory and is a pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle. For more about Justin, see here:
http://theresurgence.com/authors/justin-holcomb

To buy the book, Rid of My Disgrace, see here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20

For Part 1 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-abuse-and-gospel-interview...

For Part 2 of the interview:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-assault-and-gospel-intervi...
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GL: In your book you deal with the emotions following the trauma of sexual assault. How does the Gospel bring hope and healing?

JH: We deal with the negative and destructive emotions that result from sexual assault. Emotions are not merely physiological impulses that can be simply ignored, trivialized, or controlled. Our emotions are not just chemicals in our brain and physiological responses to stimuli. Emotions are to be taken seriously and listened to. They reveal what you believe about God, yourself, your experience of sexual assault, others, and the world. What you believe has a huge connection to how you respond to disgrace, violence, denial, shame, guilt, fear, anxiety, bitterness, despair, and so on.

The beliefs that accompany the development, maintenance, and increase of disgrace and distress are directly responsible for generating dysfunctional emotions and their effects for victims. This means that emotions can be fed or fought by the one experiencing them. Grace of God fights against the emotions accompanying your disgrace and nurtures you new emotions.

The gospel of Jesus offers new emotions to victims and how they relate to the current emotions victims experience.

Grace offers to victims the gift of refuting distortions and faulty thinking and replacing their condemning, counterfactual beliefs with more accurate ones that reflect the truths about God, themselves, and God’s grace-filled response to their disgrace.

God’s grace dismantles the beliefs that give disgrace life. Grace re-creates what violence destroyed.Read more

This is Part 2 of my interview with Justin Holcomb, who wrote Rid of My Disgrace with his wife, Lindsey.

To buy a copy of Rid of My Disgrace, click here:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20

For Part 1, click here:
http://commongroundsonline.org/content/sexual-abuse-and-gospel-interview...
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GL: How do you define sexual assault?

JH: There are three parts to our definition of sexual assault: 1) any type of sexual behavior or contact 2) where consent is not freely given or obtained and 3) is accomplished through force, intimidation, violence, coercion, manipulation, threat, deception, or abuse of authority.

This definition gets beyond our society’s narrow understanding of the issue and expands the spectrum of actions to be considered sexual assault. A definition that is too narrow can cause some victims of assault and those who should be supporting them to downplay the experience.Read more

Recently, Justin and Lindsey Holcomb published Rid of My Disgrace http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1433515989/commongrounds-20, a book that brings the reader face to face with the helpless horror of sexual abuse. But the Holcombs don't leave readers in despair; they also apply the Gospel to the hurts and shame that survivors experience.

Full disclosure: Justin and I are old friends, going back to our time together at Reformed Theological Seminary-Orlando. He went on to Emory for his PhD in religious studies, and we met up again in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia where I was working on my PhD and he was a post-doctoral fellow. In Charlottesville Justin met Lindsey, who trained in social work and then served sexual abuse survivors in town.

Today Justin and Lindsey are in Seattle, parents of two daughters. Justin is a pastor at Mars Hill Church where he serves the pastors, staff and laity.

Today is the start of a several part interview with Justin about Rid of My Disgrace.
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It was Christmas of 2008 that my feet began to hurt in a weird way. It took some months to figure out that I had neuromas (cysts on the nerve) in each foot. Last September I spent most of my daughter’s wedding barefoot; the excruciating pain eventually had me begging for surgery in October. The neuromas were three times the size that the surgeon usually removes. The medical term used to describe them was “bad-ass.”

But the one incision never quite healed, and February 28 it took 8 hours for infection to turn my foot into what my daughter later said looked like a bruised grapefruit. That night I spent on the couch weeping in agony, unable to touch it down, scooting or crawling when I absolutely had to move. I never felt so alone in my life. In the early morning, a friend took me to the doctor, and on his order, immediately to the emergency room. So began my first week in the hospital, and another surgery to lance and drain and pack, and days of IV antibiotics.Read more

Stephanie and I saw Limitless the other night. If you haven't seen it, what follows is all SPOILERS.

Some reflections:

Among educated, middle or upper middle or upper class people, it's an old and cherished fantasy to use ALL of our brains, ALL of our potential, ALL of our talent. We're all bedeviled to varying degrees by our limitations. The many weaknesses in my character…the lack of discipline…whatever…get in the way of us being all that we could be.

This awareness is both painful and humbling on one hand, and tantalizing on the other. If.... If we could somehow crack the code and figure it out, we would be limit-less.

This is part of the Western "story" of progress, of human potential, of achievement. Again, it's an old fantasy.

It's an old story in Scripture, too. Eve, then Adam, heard a story of potential that was just outside their grasp. All they needed was to disbelieve the Story and reach out for the fruit.Read more

A friend introduced me to blogging in mid-February 2005. He blogged for all of 3 months, signing off the day after twenty-five friends and I launched Common Grounds Online. Through this friend's blog I met a friend of his, and through him I met David Wayne, the Jollyblogger.

The Jollyblogger was one of a few heavily trafficked Christian blogs in the spring of 2005. David had already attained a vast readership and it was obvious why he had: David had a gift for taking complex, often controversial topics and reflecting upon them with clarity, wisdom and grace.

David and I shared in common RTS-Orlando and a love for Richard Pratt. In short order I read everything he posted and at some point our virtual relationship developed to the point that I took him up on his public invitation to DC/VA/MD bloggers to meet up for dinner in near DC. Read more