Love Does It My Way

coverThere have been very few instances in my life where someone has shown me a book, I’ve read it, and it significantly changed my life for good or ill. So when, for nearly a year, my Twitter feed and Facebook timeline routinely had quotes from and reviews of Bob Goff’s book Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World, I had cautioned optimism that perhaps there might be something I was missing out on by not yet having read it myself. So, after finishing a fiction book this summer, I decided to finally give the book a try. My cautiousness was warranted. Read the rest of this entry »

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2b or not 2b, lol

As I mentioned in a previous post, I really don’t like “The Message” by Eugene H. Peterson. I will probably type up an exhaustive list of reasons why in a subsequent post, but for now it is sufficient to say that I hold it in the same regard as I do the current History Channel (sans aliens): technically correct, but completely missing the point.

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Response: How to Suck at Your Religion

This is starting to pop up in my social circles so I figured I might as well write a response to it now. Recently, Matthew Inman, the cartoonist of the very popular and funny The Oatmeal, posted a comic in which he laid out his view on how people suck at their religion. The cartoon seeks to enumerate Inman’s problems with religion, or at least his problems with the adherents to religion, in a humorous fashion. While I didn’t particularly find it as amusing as some of his other work, others online have already taken to using it as a kind of argument against religion and hail it as a kind of “Finally, someone said this in a succinct way.”

In this post I would like to attempt to add my commentary to the arguments Inman lays out. I do this, not because I hate silly internet cartoons (in fact, I love The Oatmeals other comics), but because Inman has conveniently posted a list of some of the most common arguments against religiosity, and I figure this is a good a time as any to do a survey on why I think they are misguided.

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The Bird

I dislike The Message. A lot. If there is one thing I can point to in the modern Christian world that is the embodiment of most things I find objectionable about modernity creeping its way into the Church, it would be The Message. My problems with it are many, spanning from how it assumes that the modern reader is too ignorant to understand anything outside the vernacular to the stripping away of anything resembling the poetic, the historical, or the traditional. It takes scripture and turns it into pop fiction and in doing so rips out it’s soul. Which is why, one day, I decided to illustrate my distaste by rewriting Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven in the same way the authors of The Message would have translated the psalms. Below is my meager attempt at satire.

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Egg on the Face

A few days ago was the Western Easter and as normal, the old facebook was filled with the types of things you’d expect on Easter: posts about redemption and Jesus, simple “Happy Easter”s, and pictures of little kids in suits hunting for eggs. Yet a couple of things that I had hardly noticed last year around this time cropped up again this year and in more force.

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