Why I want to follow Jesus

Why I don't think "church" and "Christian community" are synonymous.

John of the Cross and his maxims.

Callid explains postmodernism.
If you haven’t found your way over to the Image of Fish yet, you need to. Callid is my newest, bestest friend that I’ve never met. He’s brilliant, he’s bearded, and I like the way he thinks. This video is Callid’s explanation of postmodernism, and it’s good. So mosey on to the Image of Fish, comment, and subscribe.

Sin, Violence, and René Girard
Christian theology is spoken in a language of metaphors, and it always has been. These metaphors have always been enculturated, revealing just as much about the people engaging with the gospel as they reveal about the gospel itself. Throughout the history of religion, people have used ideas that they already understand to begin to fathom the unfathomable. Rabbi Elijah, a 10th century Palestianian thinker, records a midrash about the Oral Torah and the Written Torah: What is the difference between the Written and the Oral Law? To what can it be compared? To a king of flesh and blood who had two servants and loved them both with a perfect love. He gav

Reforming Jediism
Having finished our Jedi training to the level of Apprentice, Lindsey and I agreed that Jediism needed some major reform. It seems to us that the Church of the Jedi has forgotten its roots and has chosen to become a self-interested clique. Rather than taking itself seriously, the Church promotes and endorses training courses (which one must purchase!) that are full of typos and misspellings. The training tasks that we did, though for the first level only, seemed asinine and arbitrary. So, in an attempt to redeem the noble ideas of Jediism, Lindsey and I have composed 9.5 theses (95 seemed a little ambi

The Offensiveness of the Gospel
Yesterday morning after checking the forecast, I flipped through the channels in an attempt to delay the inevitable act of getting out of bed. Either by providence or coincidence, I came upon a particularly fiery preacher and paused to see what I might learn. Less than 30 seconds later, he said this: The more you become like Jesus, the more repulsive you will become to the “unsaved.” I was intrigued by his bold claim, so I tweeted it to see what my friends around the world thought. The responses that I received ran the gamut from “What Jesus is that guy following?” to “I can see where he’s coming fro

Narrative philosophy or a philosophy of narrative?
My friend Ian is a brilliant writer and story-teller. I asked him once how he did it. He said that he has to wait on characters who find their way to him from a dark wood in his mind. The characters are often shy, unsure of how to respond to the disembodied voice who will become their narrator. Eventually, these timid fictives step forward and begin to tell their story. For Ian, this is the place from which stories come, and these stories can be used to communicate any message, to stir up any emotion, and to prove any point. If you want to do theology or philosophy, says Ian, tell a story. At times, I