“Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger,” James 1:19. It’s advice that greatly changed my life nearly a decade and a half ago. While I had grown up in an evangelical Christian household, as a teen I rebelled. I first turned to other religions, butRead More →
Ever sense Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code, there has been a mass of misinformation about Constantine, and the Council of Nicaea. This information was already circulating before Brown’s book, but he helped take this conspiracy theory and propel it into the mainstream. Brown isn’t a historian, but theRead More →
Every once in awhile I will see a meme pop up that deals with religion. For a long time, I’d think about them and then my wife would get to hear about all that was wrong with the meme, but recently I started saving the actual meme. I wasn’t sureRead More →
Christian faith does not have to be a belief in the unbelievable. Yet, over the last few decades, this is the way many have begun to speak about Christianity. That the Christian faith requires one to blindly accept it, whether or not the ideas are truly believable. For many withinRead More →
Every few years, headlines exclaim that the belief in God is on the decline in the United States. The claims often stem from polls conducted by the Pew Research Center, which for some time have shown a gradual increase in those who are classified as “nones,” those who have noRead More →
What do you do when your minister makes the bold claim that Jesus was definitely not born of a virgin? That when Matthew states Mary was a virgin, the word Matthew used didn’t actually mean virgin. Or that virgin births were a common trope, that even the Emperor was saidRead More →
Did you know that Christmas is a pagan holiday? It’s one of those “facts” that gets passed around during the Christmas season every year. Most people simply take it at face value. But this fact is a creation of the 19th century. It arose at the same time the mythRead More →
There are times in which the world seems to be overwhelming. Life continues to throw punches, and they all can’t be blocked. Everything can just begin to wear you down, and in those moments, it’s not uncommon to cry out in lament. In Psalms 137, we see that happen. InRead More →
Millennia before I sat down to try to tackle the question of why bad things happen to good people, another had set out to do the same thing. Taking traditional wisdom, and using it as a framework for his own argument, the author of the Book of Job created aRead More →
Why do we suffer? I’m not sure that question can ever be fully answered. The ways in which we suffer are exceptionally diverse, and the factors that lead to suffering are infinitely varied. But in order to even begin to understand how suffering could coexist with an all-loving God, weRead More →