discussion on Deconstruction

Deconstruction isn’t a  trendy  thing to do, but it is a  trend  that is happening at scale in our country and passing from person to person. Anecdotally, when I look up various hashtags on TikTok, th...

[R]eliable quantitative research around this has brought some helpful insights to light. Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge have released the largest study ever done on dechurching in America i...

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

The robbing of our lives occurs when the core story of who we are—created as “very good” (Gen 1:31) and never downgraded, and “beloved” of God (1 Jn 3:2)—is taken through specific memories and twisted...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

Some skeptics today speak about “evolving” from a primitive condition, but the Bible (Romans 1:18-32) sadly portrays a  descent  rather than an ascent. The result has been given the theological term “...

The cornerstone was a critical element of ancient architecture, the anchor that the rest of the building relied on. The cornerstone was the stone that set the alignment of the entire building. Every o...

When we aim at certainty when it comes to our Christian beliefs, it sets us up for failure. …Imagine someone with a lot of time on their hands who painstakingly constructs a five-foot-high house of...

What is the matter with us is a question as old as time. Many philosophers and prophets believe they have an answer, but so too does holy scripture. According to the Dutch-Canadian philosopher Al Wolt...

Even though it’s now associated with him, Nietzsche didn’t coin the phrase God is dead. As the son of a Lutheran pastor, he would have heard that line in a Lutheran Holy Saturday hymn. And although...

In those same weeks, Harper’s Magazine featured an evening-long conversation between two professors, Neil Postman and Camille Paglia, about the meaning of television for persons and for polities...

What we need to realize, however, is that there is no such thing as autonomous or “self-grounding” knowledge. All systems of interpretation and all claims to true knowledge are ultimately grounded out...

When I think of masterpieces, I think of art. But what is art? I like the way that Thomas Hoving, who was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, put it: “Art happens when anyon...

The cross, Martin Luther wrote, was the devil’s mousetrap. The devil smelled cheese, and wham, felt steel. Thus, we see a little baby lying defenseless in a crib at Bethlehem, and a tortured man hangi...

The Russian writer Leo Tolstoy describes a view (not his own view, because Tolstoy was a Christian) of the human person, based on a theory of reality he saw emerging in his day. It is a narrative that...

Lucy says to Charlie Brown: ‘You know what the whole trouble with you is, Charlie Brown?’ ‘No; and I don’t want to know! Leave me alone!’ ‘The whole trouble with you is you won’t listen to w...

The cross of Jesus is the world’s supreme example of anguish, suffering and injustice, but it has nothing to do with tragedy as we experience it in Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare—trag...

James Elkins talks about how even the sense of sight is more complicated than we might believe: “Our eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where ...

We cannot be closed off to one another and be open to God. That’s not how this works. Do you remember the commercial when the woman says “that’s not how this works, that's not how any of this work...

The atheist author Richard Dawkins, who wrote, “The universe, at the bottom, has no design, no purpose, no evil, and no other good. Nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor care...

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children...

Reject Christianity, if you will, out of motives of cynicism; turn away from it because you believe. Reality is malign and punitive; choose a God that is cantankerous, vindictive, or forgetful, or det...

The other afternoon, in an effort to avoid doing my work, I picked up Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. It turned out to be a fitting choice, as Thoreau has quite a bit to say about wasting time. “The cos...

The social location of enslaved persons caused them to read the Bible differently. This unabashedly located reading has marked African American interpretation since. Did this social location mean Blac...

Writing about ministering to postmodern skeptics, Don Everts and Doug Schaupp share a helpful insight into the mystery of God's movement: The first lesson they have taught us about the path to f...

God formed us in his image — a glorious thought! — but we all participate in the abandonment of that original identity…Does that mean that your precious little child is a dirty rotten sinner, as some ...

"God's joy," said by the Persian mystic Rumi, "moves from unmarked box to unmarked box, from cell to cell. As rain water down into flower bed. As roses up from ground. Now it looks ...

After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.”  With its Latin roots, “across” and ...

Before my mentor, Dallas Willard, passed over to glory, I asked him what he thought about the rapid rise of the Christian spiritual formation movement. He said, “It is a wonderful thing, but my fear i...

Our 24/7 culture conveniently provides every good and service we want, when we want, how we want. Our time – saving devices, technological conveniences, and cheap mobility have seemingly made life muc...