From the category archives:
So we have this legend, this tradition — a jolly old man with a white beard and funny old clothes who showers those of us lucky enough to reside in Christendom with gifts on December 25 in honor of Jesus’s birth. We Christians in the Western World are the spiritual children of the Hebrew Patriarch […]
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I like this display — it is the modern depiction of the overturning of the tables of the moneychangers. Of course, Jesus didn’t physically harm those ancient swindlers in any way — but then again, Santa Claus doesn’t exist as anything but a symbol, and a convoluted one at that. He is abject greed disguised […]
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Archeologists searching for evidence of the Exodus as portrayed in the Old Testament have found little to scientifically convince that any such thing took place. What they do find is that the entire region of the 40-year Biblical wanderings of the former Semitic slaves of the Egyptians was comprised of city-states under the influence of […]
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First, is there a difference? If you are convinced there is something wrong with your character and behavior, are you a convict? Not necessarily, it would seem. To be convicted there has to be some kind of criminal charge brought and presumably a sentence that can be given; being convinced of wrongful behavior or thought […]
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At the end of John’s Gospel Peter gets impatient waiting for the resurrected Messiah to show up with further instructions and goes fishing with the other Apostles. They catch nothing all night. In the morning they see Jesus on the beach grilling fish (where’d He get those?) He tells them to cast the net on […]
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Lots of people claim to know what it is about human behavior that upsets God. But if we’re talking about the God who Jesus revealed, there was really only one thing that absolutely made Him wig out. He came to a time and place when there was a lot of bad stuff going on. The […]
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Made in the image of the Transcendent God, we are transcendent beings, albeit on a limited basis. We are in and of the natural world — our internal biological systems are semi autonomous, controlled from within our bodies as is the case with other living things. We are wholly mammalian, but unlike other mammals, in […]
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All knowledge is a category of consciousness, for what is outside of consciousness is, by definition, unknown. Man cannot, therefore, define consciousness itself, just as no one of us can fully know ourselves except through being known by others. In that there is a collective consciousness — shared human knowledge of the entirety of the […]
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The fact is that I know what I’m up against when trying to argue this point with people of the prevailing – nearly ubiquitous, in fact – mindset of the modern West. I’ve done my own “study” of this. When asked to draw a picture of the earth as they believe God sees it, people […]
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One of the great talents of PBS documentarian Ken Burns is that he can put the viewer in the place of the viewed. His stark depictions and spot-on voiceovers put us in the moment with those whose lives are being chronicled. In the WWII series The War, there’s an instance of this where, after descriptions […]
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