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Ted Turner Losing His Religion
Ted Turner. He is 71 years old (written in 2014), and still in the news. With a net worth estimated around $2.3 billion, Turner has made an impact on cable television, news reporting, and major league... -
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Existential Brokenheartedness
In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer describes a surprising dynamic that sometimes occurs in the life of a Christian: believing so strongly in a loving God that one cannot fathom th... -
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A God who cannot suffer is poorer than any human. For a God who is incapable of suffering is a being who cannot be involved. Suffering and injustice do not affect him. And because he is so completely ... -
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I am a Christian because of that moment on the cross when Jesus, drinking the very dregs of human bitterness, cries out, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?...The point is that he felt human de... -
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Faith does not grow in spite of suffering, but through suffering, when hope learns to contradict reality. -
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Dying for Jesus or Socrates?
Justin Martyr (ca. 100–165), the most renowned apologist of the second century, dedicated his life to defending Christianity as the one true philosophy. Engaging the Greek philosophers and intellectua... -
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The inevitability of the death of Jesus does not stem from God’s need but from humanity’s. There are only two roles to play in the tale of divine and human relationships, persecutor or persecuted. God... -
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No human tears are beyond the reach of God’s infinite goodness. -
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When Evil Is Dethroned
Sometimes evil can feel so strong, so powerful, that its damage seems permanent and the final word on the subject. In this short excerpt from Philip Yancey, we see a reversal, perhaps a foretaste of w... -
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The Child Born in the Night Among Beasts
In this excerpt, Frederick Buechner shares a meditation on the vulnerability of Jesus’ birth: The child born in the night among beasts. The sweet breath and steaming dung of beasts. And nothing is... -
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Where is God? Hanging From the Gallows
In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi... -
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The News-Media: Moving from Sports to Entertainment to Horrible Crises
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... -
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An essential part of the teachings and directives of the great religious and philosophical thinkers the world over has been on the meaning of pain and suffering. -
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[Every culture has provided an] explanation of human events that bestows meaning upon the experiences of suffering and evil. -
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There is in the psalms no quick and easy resignation to suffering. There is always struggle, anxiety, and doubt. God’s righteousness, which allows the pious to be met by misfortune but the godless to... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, Hebrews 2:10-18
Will the Real Jesus, Please Stand Up? Quite a few years have passed since I sat through a systematic theology class and had the professor pitch a variety of difficult to hit balls at us regarding the... -
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A Great Big World Out There
The great temptation of suffering is to let your pain become the whole world and to start believing that all that ever was, is and will be, is your private hell. God’s frontal assault on Job’s egotism... -
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Did Jesus Really Suffer on the Cross?
Jesus did not descend from the cross. He was powerless, delivered up to his opponents. There was a false and erroneous form of Christianity that refused to accept that. As early as the second century ... -
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Evil and suffering are real . . . They aren’t an illusion, nor are they simply an absence of good. We are fallen creatures living in a fallen world that has been twisted and corrupted by sin, and we a... -
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Two Kind of Books on Pain
Books on the problem of pain divide neatly into two groupings. The older ones, by people like Aquinas, Bunyan, Donne, Luther, Calvin, and Augustine, ungrudgingly accept pain and suffering as God’s use... -
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God should Resign if…
Rabbi Harold Kushner tried to explain suffering by saying God too is pained by death but cannot do anything about it. (Elie Wiesel once said in response to Kushner, “If that’s who God is, he should re... -
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The World’s Finale
I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of t... -
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Suffering is Evidence of God’s Presence
Suffering is not evidence of God’s absence, but of God’s presence, and it is in our experience of being broken that God does his surest and most characteristic salvation work. There is a way to accept... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, 2 Timothy 2:8-15
Preaching Commentary Paul’s Gospel In 1 Corinthians 1:17-25 we find the gospel that Paul preaches summarized in Christ’s crucifixion. Here in 2 Timothy 2:8, Paul’s gospel is encapsulated in Christ’... -
scripture guide
Scripture Guide, Psalm 22 (Guide B)
Ancient lens What’s the historical context? A Structured Complaint The Psalmist organizes his complaint against God in three sections. The first two sections dramatize the complaint (vv. 1-11 and... -
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A Christian Approach to Suffering
In the summer of 2012, I knelt over the frail shell of a child, my son, strapped to all manner of medical monitoring equipment. His body failing, his frame thinning, the medical staff at Arkansas Chil... -
liturgy
O God, You desire not the death of sinners, but rather
Pastor: O God, You desire not the death of sinners, but rather that we turn from our evil way and live. We come before You, although we have sinned and deserve only Your wrath; yet we flee to Your ... -
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The point [of suffering] is that while Christians may suffer in this age and so have no future here, there is waiting for the faithful a reward as sure and as real as that of Abraham, a reward far bet... -
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Longing for Eden
In a letter to his son, J. R. R. Tolkien famously wrote, “We all long for [Eden], and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane, is... -
lectionary
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Summary The Text: 1 Peter 3:13-22 In the first chapter of this letter, Peter sets out the reason for writing. He affirms the eternal state of the believer: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lo...
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