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September 2018

September 06, 2018

What the Author Meant May Not Matter

At the beginning of a seminar on the books of Exodus and Job from the...

September 02, 2018

Remembering John McCain: How to Move Past a Season of Cowardice

While the President of the United States tweeted his usual string of petty Saturday morning...

August 2018

August 30, 2018

Is Planet Earth a Loser?

My youngest son was born in 1981 and grew up as Americans began, for the...

August 26, 2018

Taking Our Country Back

One of my favorite staff writers for The New Yorker is Rebecca Mead; she’s been...

August 23, 2018

Getting Over Original Sin

Last Tuesday, on the sixth anniversary of my blog, I posted my first blog post--an...

August 19, 2018

Wrestling With the Story

In Lies We Believe Abut God, Wm. Paul Young (author of The Shack) tells the...

August 16, 2018

Get Up, Kill, and Eat

I grew up in hunting country where at the appropriate times each year the males...

August 12, 2018

I Didn’t Make This Stuff Up

During the three years that I lived in Milwaukee while completing my Ph.D. studies at...

August 09, 2018

To Live In Safety and Without Fear

Every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig-tree, and there shall...

August 05, 2018

Faith Without Creed

One Sunday, not too many months ago, I decided to pay close attention to the...

August 02, 2018

The Whatevers

Although I regularly find myself immersed in things medieval with a bunch of freshmen every...

July 2018

July 31, 2018

Magnetic Jesus

In one of the many recent books written by an atheist about Christianity (I forget...

July 29, 2018

Like this God Stuff is Real

In her wonderful memoir Take This Bread, Sara Miles tells us of a conversation she...

July 24, 2018

What I Learned About My Faith When I Visited Cuba

Fifteen years ago, I was part of a group of a dozen or so academics...

July 22, 2018

Don’t Be Afraid

I had the opportunity to spend two hours with a young man named Hayden Bruce...

July 17, 2018

Expecting to Find Light

We are not simply made by God—we are made of God Julian of Norwich I...

July 15, 2018

What If God and Morality Have Nothing to Do with Each Other?

Is there any true transcendence, or is this idea always a consoling dream projected by...

July 10, 2018

God’s Works Are as Good as We Make Them

God would have us know that we must live as people who manage our lives...

July 08, 2018

God is Just a Story (and so are we)

Although the name of this blog is “Freelance Christianity,” and it is published on Patheos’...

July 05, 2018

To Whom Do You Belong?

A couple of years ago, my college celebrated its centennial. For Jeanne and me, the...

July 03, 2018

All Things Shall Be Well?

All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall...

July 01, 2018

Prayer for People Who Don’t Believe in God

Last week I contracted with a publisher to write a book on prayer--the working title...

June 2018

June 28, 2018

Does Everything Work Together for Good?

Jeanne and I recently had the opportunity to see a local community theater’s production of...

June 23, 2018

Is America a Christian Nation? Should It Be?

A question that is almost guaranteed to start an argument in some circles goes to...

June 21, 2018

This is What You are Afraid of

Frederick Buechner says that vocation is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s...

June 19, 2018

Be Careful What You Vote For

An annual musical fixture of my Baptist upbringing was the Easter Cantata. Each year on...

June 17, 2018

When to Be Skeptical, and When to Believe

Once upon a time two explorers came upon a clearing in the jungle. In the...

June 14, 2018

Lessons Learned From a Blackberry Bush

A few years ago, Jeanne returned from a weekend with a friend in Vermont with...

June 05, 2018

Jesus Has a Bad Day

A conversation heard behind the scenes: Dude! Did you see what just happened?? How could...

June 03, 2018

The Kingdom of Heaven is Like a Weed

My family and I spent three years in the middle nineties living in the South—specifically,...

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