When I was a kid back in the 1980s, I had a somewhat conflicted relationship with “secular” music. Two of the first albums/cassettes in my collection (c. 1981-2) were “secular”: The Who, Meaty, Beaty, Big and Bouncy and Journey, Escape. And truth be known, they both blew away Petra, Never Say Die despite my mom’s attempt to […]
Christian discipleship
Adjust Your Expectations
Christian discipleship is made more difficult when people imbibe the notion that God wants us happy, healthy, and wealthy. As a result, when things go awry, as they inevitably do, people often experience a crisis of faith for which they could have been far better prepared if their expectations had been set properly from the […]
The tale of the man who wiped his bum with silk napkins (and how it damns us all)
There once was a very rich man who kept a stock of fine silk napkins in his bathroom. He did so because he preferred wiping with silk — pedestrian tissue is so harsh and unforgiving — and also because he could afford to. And so, once a week the servants would bring two bags full of […]
Death to happy clappy Christianity: A Holy Saturday Meditation
Holy Saturday tends to get lost in the hubbub between Good Friday commemoration and Easter Sunday celebration. We spend Holy Saturday hiding chocolate eggs and hammering out the details for Easter Brunch. But when we do that we miss something important: we live on Holy Saturday. Theologians call it the “already/not yet” in which the […]
