Happy New Year. No single theme, in this post, but a few observations. Hell You may have figured out I’ve not presented a linear theme development from post to post lately. Just before Christmas I was working on a writing project and the topic of hell naturally came up. What a topic for the holidays. I didn’t […]
Read more...Category: Bible
Hell
Here I am right at the height of the holidays, and I’m thinking about hell. A few months ago I started re-reading Dante’s Inferno. I got about a third through and it wasn’t clicking very well, I felt I must be missing something. So I paused, did a little reading about the book instead of […]
Read more...Beautyway
Paradigm Setting I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of Cain and Abel. It’s obviously a very important story, being one of the stories in the first part of Genesis that sets the paradigm for our understanding of reality, as with Creation, the Fall, the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. To our ears […]
Read more...But If Not
I looked forward to seeing the movie “Dunkirk.” I even went to see it at a movie theater; unusual for me. It seemed to start off weird, though, and never quite recovered. It was almost as if they were trying to minimize the heroic stuff. It also felt a bit like they were trying to drag […]
Read more...The Runway
In a peculiar way, those days before a person’s inevitable end to this life have a particular heft, so to speak. A feeling of particular consequence. We look at life from a higher vantage point, and better distinguish what is important and real, from what is silly and illusory. What happens next? How can we not […]
Read more...What is Faith?
Here are two diverging ideas of what faith is. No Evidence One is the notion that faith is belief in something without any evidence to support it. This is the stance taken by most atheist materialists: that faith is merely childish acceptance of something as being true without demanding that it actually be true, or that […]
Read more...Ashby
The official plot summary for this movie is: “High-school student Ed Wallis enters into a friendship with his neighbor, Ashby, a retired CIA assassin who only has a few months left to live.” The ex-CIA set-up is kind of worn out, but that element really isn’t necessary to what the movie is about. You can […]
Read more...Religiosity and Religion
Doctrine “Religiosity” means the traditions that we tend to put in place of genuine relationship to God. “Religion,” though, should not be as much a pejorative as it seems to be for many people today. At heart it just means collective worship of God on shared ideas of who God is. So it implies doctrines, […]
Read more...Napkin Religion
Atheist visual joke: Ha ha. The Bible doesn’t prove anything about God, an atheist might contend, because it is not self-authenticating. Whatever it says about God is just something someone wrote down. Even if its words include the assertion that the words are God-inspired, how do we know that to be true? Anyone could […]
Read more...The Trapped Woman
These are reflections on a sermon of the same name, by Jason Harris, pastor of Central Presbyterian Church, New York City, February 15, 2015. We understand the text at John 7:53 through 8:11 to be about how we should not judge others. This is the story of the woman caught in adultery. The church leaders […]
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