Reading Time: 6 minutes For your movie streaming pleasure, here’s my review of #3 in the “God’s Not Dead” movie franchise series. While it did poorly financially, the script was an improvement on its predecessors.
church
Posted inReligious News
These stories of the ‘worst church service ever attended’ are horrifying
Reading Time: 2 minutes Sometimes, if you want to hear an interesting story, all you need is the right prompt. And this one on Twitter, asking people to share the worst church service they ever attended, was enough to inspire them to share all kinds of troubling anecdotes. There are so many responses, it’s hard to share them all, […]
Posted inEthics and Morality
Is ‘sentientism’ really better in practice than humanism?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Imagine a world where all sentient beings – human or otherwise – have recognized and protected rights. That’s sentientism. But is it better?
Posted inThe Secular
Is social media ‘church’ for atheists? I didn’t think so until now
Reading Time: 4 minutes Two weeks ago I had my Facebook account shut down for child pornography. Yup, you read that right. A couple weeks ago, I was lying on my couch on a Tuesday night, relaxing with a glass of wine and watching TV at about 10:30pm. Suddenly, a strange text message came in from a family member: […]
Posted inParenting & Family
My 6-year-old’s best friend invited him to church—and the church paid him to do it
Reading Time: 4 minutes Last weekend, my youngest son invited his best friend to come over and play. They had a great time. They played video games, built some Lego creations, and somehow made enough slamming and banging noises throughout the house to make me think we invited his entire first-grade class over. But when they took a break […]
Posted inMeaning & Purpose
The resurrection of Ethical Culture
Reading Time: 5 minutes This one’s for my people. My Ethical Culture people, the people I spoke to in my last column declaring Ethical Culture “dead.” I have heard from a lot of you in the day since my column was published. Some of you are angry. Some of you are sad. Some of you are relieved that someone […]
Posted inParenting & Family, Religion
What Kind of Parent Would Your Faith Make?
Reading Time: 6 minutes We are not fallen angels but emerging beings. —Bishop Spong I’ve been trying for a while to boil down my chief objections to the faith of my youth, and I think I’ve settled on the metaphor that best sums it up. I’ve decided my greatest problem with the Christian faith isn’t its avoidance of responsibility […]
Posted inReligion
The Big Church Meeting in ‘This Present Darkness’ (LSP #115, Ch. 10)
Reading Time: 11 minutes Finally, we enter the big scene Peretti set up as the big conflict from the start of the novel: a church voting scene. We’ll look at how this scene might have resonated with Peretti as an author, and what it actually accomplishes in the novel’s setting. Today, Lord Snow Presides over a scene that demonstrates just how far from reality evangelical pastors’ lives truly are.
Posted inUncategorized
How Evangelicals Handle Doubt
Reading Time: 6 minutes I visited another local church yesterday, and as usual it left me with some…thoughts. Friends on social media seem a bit perturbed that I keep doing this to myself, but I have good reasons for it. My family is one of many torn apart by the culture wars that have been driving wedges between loved […]
Posted inUncategorized
What’s a Church For, Anyway?
Reading Time: 9 minutes I recently wrote about a revelation of sorts that I feel I need to unpack a bit more. I attended a large Baptist church in an affluent community not too far from where I live and witnessed first-hand how sincerely some white evangelicals are struggling to understand why all their valiant efforts at winning the […]