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

For the first time in my life, I read through the Bible in 2010. I wanted to get a better sense of the patterns and narratives and themes in the Bible. In honor of the year 2010, I’ve written 10 patterns I found repeated in the Bible; let me know any additions, thoughts, or corrections you have for this list.

1. Faithful patience over long periods of time is rewarded. Old Testament characters get promoted to greater responsibilities after proving themselves faithful in trials. For instance, Joseph faithfully endures slavery and prison, and both trials result in gaining great honor. The same is true for Daniel and David who are tested and prove themselves faithful before gaining great esteem in their respective cultures. Read more

Grace is funny.  She draws fire from all sides, yet she always prevails.
 
She offends some because when she shows up, she points out the sin she intends to heal and redeem.  She offends others because she gives herself so freely—she really ought to be earned.
 Read more

Duke Kwon is an Read more

In the dark recesses of the night, I sometimes lie awake and contemplate questions which turn inside my head.  “What it means to be human” is at the forefront of my most recent pondering.  This question is a hot topic among various disciplines and I have decided to explore this question in my own study of bioethics over the next several years.  I find this particular question probing amidst the backdrop of advancing technology in fields such as science and medicine.  “What can be done with regard to humans?” is quickly being followed by, “What should be done with humans?”  The answers, in short, are myriad. 

As a Christian who is preparing to give a reasoned response to these questions, I am excited about the intellectual aspect of my journey.  I marvel over the fact that loving God includes engaging one’s mind.  But even at this juncture, before the tasks surrounding my studies begin, I understand that the exploration of what it means to be human occurs while living alongside humanity.  No matter how technologically advanced our world may become, I cannot escape the fact that people are at the heart of what it means to be human.  My upcoming intellectual pursuits are important, yet they serve to inform my living among particular individuals.  At the same time, there are certain individuals who will color my approach to the question of what it means to be human.  The two are inextricably linked.  Read more

Lawyer: Ms. Martinez, you just testified that the bank robber was wearing a Texas 

Rangers hat, didn’t you?

Martinez: Yes.

Lawyer: And you also said that one of the two bank robbers dropped his hat when you

chased him out of the bank, isn’t that right?

Martinez: That’s correct.

Lawyer: Ms. Martinez, the hat left there that day was a Texas Rangers hat, wasn’t it?

Martinez: Yes.

Lawyer: No further questions.

I knew I had won my case the moment Martinez answered “yes” to that final question. Nowhere in the facts before me was there ever a mention that the hat left at the scene was a Texas Rangers ball cap. I didn’t actually care whether it was. I just needed the witness to say it was so. As I prepared the defense case for my client on trial for bank robbery, I strategized about the most misleading and suggestive way I could phrase the questions just so I could get a “yes” out of this witness. And with these three craftily worded questions, I had led this witness into giving me what I wanted. The trial ended with a hung jury and my client was free and clear. Victory.Read more

I have been thinking about judgment, since last Sunday’s sermon on the 8th chapter of Amos.  The pastor is preaching through the book, and it is not pleasant. Amos’s visions of impending judgment are bitter, horrific, appalling. Read more

Reading postmodern philosophers Jean Francois Lyotard and Michel Foucault reminds me that our on-the-street understanding of knowledge effectively eclipses its normative dimension. These philosophers call us back to this biblical insight.

It’s still broadly presumed that facts and values belong to distinct and opposing categories, for example. Students still show up at college already programmed with the default setting that knowledge is passively registered information. People take this default setting to church and Bible studies, too. We think that AFTER we get the information, only then do we apply it. Hear the implicit divorce between theoria and praxis?

Had we been more savvy (to quote my favorite pirate) about knowledge, we might not have thought the postmoderns were obliterating truth when they rightly named its normative dimension. All knowledge is embedded in prescriptive rules that constitute a language game, says Lyotard. (“Knock, knock!” I say; you say…See?) Sentences should be seen as moves in a game; you never should be, or should leave your hearer, or your world, in the same place at the end of the move. Foucault recommends an awareness of good kind of power/knowledge (two sides of a coin) that is like blood traversing the earthy veins of the human world (my analogy). Read more

He bursts onto the scene, literally out of nowhere.  Then he vanishes – poof – into thin air.  Donald Miller says, “You cannot be a Christian without being a mystic.”  Miller tells a story to illustrate his point.  “I have a friend,” he writes, “who criticizes certain Christian writers for embracing what he calls ‘mysticism’… I asked him if he believed in the Trinity.  He said he did.  I asked him if he believed that the Trinity represented three separate persons who are also one.  He said he did.  I asked him if that would be considered a mystical idea.  He just stood there thinking.” 

When I think about Melchizedek, I just stand here thinking.  Who is this guy?  Read more

It’s beautiful now in Old Morocco. Autumn hasn’t yet reached its peak, but it soon will. Already the slopes visible from my house are a patchwork of reds and yellows. There isn’t much left of those slopes. Once the height of the Himalayas, they’ve been worn down and uplifted and eroded to the big shaggy hills we call mountains around here. They’re still big enough to fill the skyline behind my house, though. Still big enough to fill my eyes and my heart and my imagination. Read more