Down on the Ashram

This post is my transcription of a recent lecture by Ted Jennings, with some minor additions, posted with his permission. Latin America has a unique situation that distinguishes the theology that i…

Conversations for Ministry Leaders

One of the biggest hurdles to orthodox Christian belief in our world today is affirmation of the bodily resurrection of Jesus as historical reality. After all we know better than this. Isn’t it a m…

The topic of senior seminar in the Bible and Religion department this spring has been disability theology. Together we engage relevant biblical material and consider important contemporary figures….

Within about four minutes of announcing our yearlong series on Sexuality & the Church , I realized I was in over my head. You just don’€™t realize how many books there are to read, angles to take, and people to interview until you€’ve gone and committed to yourself to exploring a multi-faceted, hot-button issue like this one. So I emailed Richard Beck (and some others writers I respect) and asked for help. Richard’€™s blog, Experimental Theology , consistently falls into my personal Top 5 list and I can’€™t recommend it enough. Richard is a psychologist, and so his reflections on theology, the Bible, church, community, and spirituality always include some new angle I never considered before. (For example, recently he’s been discussing€œ the impossibility of Calvinistic Christian psychotherapy!) I had the privilege of meeting Richard and his awesome wife Janna when I visited Abilene Christian University a few years ago. Richard is Professor and Department Chair of Psychology there.

Phil Robertson on Faith

Gay marriage is a lightning rod issue these days. We talk with bridge-builder Andrew Marin about how the church can respond to this issue without getting burned.

Sunday morning church services are still a very segregated hour. Is that okay? Is it okay for white American Christians to go celebrate God at one church and black American Christians to go celebrate God in another church? Should changing that reality be on our radar, an idea on our to-do list? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.

I ached as I stood over the casket preaching Marcus’€™s eulogy. I had known and worked with Marcus for 15 years before he was killed when four bullets found his body while stopping to buy diapers for his child. Sometimes in life, you are in the right place at the right time€” and other times you find yourself in the middle of gun fight. I told the family and friends who had gathered, “€œGOD IS PISSED OFF AND SO AM I. We are not supposed to be here today! We are to be celebrating college graduations, birthdays, and weddings, not mourning at the funeral of a 24-year-old son, dad, nephew, and cousin.” The reality of my ministry in Chicago is that I have story after story of young men who have been a part of my world and life who have been both victims and shooters. Yet, every time tragedy strikes, the pain is the same. If you have never held a mother, father, or crying child who has had to bury a family member because of gun violence, you might not understand the need to make the to

I was riding on a crowded train during rush hour in 2010 when a little Somali girl, who couldn’t find a seat on the train, climbed into my lap and fell asleep. While I was holding her, I started talking to her mom, who told me in broken English that they were refugees from Somalia. Her husband had left the family shortly after they arrived in the U.S., and now she was stranded here, raising five children by herself, without any income or language skills or job training. Then the woman leaned her head against the window as