Posts from January 2020

I took a class on the Civil Rights movement once, and I’ve often thought of something the professor told us. “We’re all prejudiced. Every single one of us.” I don’t know if you agree with him, but I think he touched on an important point. Let me reword it slightly: We’re all tempted to view people according to superficial qualities. In fact, we do it so often and so subconsciously that we might not even notice it. We put people…

We live in the world, and it’s hard to keep it from rubbing off on us. Sometimes it’s tempting just to escape it, isn’t it? Move to the proverbial deserted island or to a rural mountain in Tibet. Some believers in church history tried that route, retreating to caves, deserts, or monasteries, but it didn’t always work well. Tempting as it might be sometimes, God never called us to retreat from the world. So here we are. We live and…

Taking the Bible seriously will absolutely make you uncomfortable. Not all of it, of course. I like the parts about Jesus giving me rest and the abundant life and preparing a beautiful mansion for me. All that sounds nice. I don’t even mind the parts about being a good person, because being reasonably good isn’t that hard most of the time. But you don’t have to look far to see something considerably more difficult than that. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was right…

I thought about beginning this article by discussing football in the state of Alabama.  Every year at this time, fans wearing either crimson and white or orange and blue claim bragging rights for the next 364 days.  But I’ll turn in a different direction here.  People enjoy being able to boast about things.  Whether it’s football, some other sport, or even the time we rang the garbage can with a wad of paper from 20 feet away, many of us…

One of the scariest things about faith for me is the incredible ability most of us have to deceive ourselves. Occasionally I’ve been appalled at the behavior of someone who called himself a Christian and wondered how he could ever reconcile his behavior with his claim to follow Jesus. “What a hypocrite!”, I’ve self-righteously mumbled. Then it hits me: Where are my blind spots? What sins am I committing but ignoring, or perhaps justifying? Maybe I don’t do what he…