Category: Christian living

The Importance of Remembering Death

Our culture rarely deals intimately with death any more: we have cordoned it off, confined it to funeral homes and hospitals, done everything to keep it separate from us as we try to think up ways and means to evade the inevitable ourselves. But it wasn't always that way. And I suspect that in the interim, something has been lost.

The Forgotten Children

There are girls I think of often. One was my best friend as a child.  In the third grade, we cut holes into trash bags and then put them on so we could be black horses, and pranced around in the yard neighing and pretending uncooked spaghetti was hay.  She visited me all the time, … Continue reading The Forgotten Children

Book Review: Evangelism for the Rest Of Us: Sharing Christ Within Your Personality Style

Do you associate the word "evangelism" with handing out tracts, seeking out strangers with whom to share the plan of salvation, and "formulas" meant to explain or advertise the gospel to others? Do these methods seem alien, uncomfortable, or cold to you? If so, Mike Bechtle's Evangelism For the Rest of Us is a book you absolutely must read. [Click title to read more.]

Beware of Third Person Perspective

As Christians, especially in this new age of what I can only call the corporate church, it's easy to reduce people to demographics. We talk about people as prospects, as "future growth," as communities, as "the unsaved" or "the lost." And to the ears of those outside the church - to the ears of those we are trying to reach - I wonder if our approach doesn't come across as occasionally dehumanizing, as though the church lives in pursuit of numbers and not souls. [Click title to read more.]

How To Be A Christian Online

As Christians, we tend to talk a lot about the Internet - what should and should not be accessible on it and how we should or should not handle that - but not about who we are on the Internet. In what ways does our faith inform our technology? Or, more to the point: how do we behave like Christians on the internet? [Click title to read more.]

Christian Self-Image and the Internet

If you spend much time on social media without the necessary brain-filters - as younger people do - you start to feel inadequate. It's inevitable. Everyone is prettier than you. They're going to more exciting places than you. Their talents are better than yours and what they're eating looks better than what you just ate. Their boyfriends and girlfriends smile, flawless, in pictures. Their material possessions, sometimes literally, sit in piles on their beds to be envied. [Click title to read more.]

Embracing The Dissonance

The other day I was frustrated over...something.  That I can't remember what it was now speaks to how minor it was, and yet at the time I was irate.  What I remember is that I did what I always do when I can't make sense of something or I need guidance: I picked up my … Continue reading Embracing The Dissonance