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A Good Book on a Sad Time
The Nazi Seizure of Power. I generally don’t link to books, and I think predicting the future by using the past is stupid. And I most assuredly do not believe that opponents of the ACA are Nazis. That is stupid as well as incoherent. You can oppose the ACA and be a respectable American. The reason I like this book, though, is that it illustrates how a sincere, moderate government can be toppled through the inaction of the moderates and the folks who just want to get along, because there are some who want to overthrow the government and take power. The Weimar Republic was fairly stable and working on…
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If Your Hair’s Too Long–AUDIO
So I said I’d make this available. So here it is: “If Your Hair’s Too Long, There’s Sin in Your Heart.” If you’ve never sat through an Evangelical church service, this is an affectionate parody. If Your Hair’s Too Long (audio file) I have the full album. It’s non-stop.
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Review: Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction
Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction by Eric Foner My rating: 5 of 5 stars Foner writes well. This is the first thing you should know. You will not be reading a dusty tome of long-ago lives. You will read about actual people from just a few short years ago, how they felt, how they struggled, what they wanted, what they hoped for. You will get in touch with these people, some enslaved, some free, some made free. Some were the people who worked for freedom, and some were those who upheld slavery. It is all a mess in a way, just like life, but Foner extracts the…
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The Difficulties of Christianity
“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” – Gilbert K. Chesterton We fail at Christianity when we think it covers only attending group meetings to listen to speeches, memorization of information about the speeches, and obedience to rules that keeps us only going to group meetings and listening to speeches. If that is what Christianity is, then it is not difficult at all, for it requires nothing of you but your body sitting passively. Christianity is about what you do with your life, and how you affect others with the love you display and the acts of mercy you do. If…
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These Things I Believe
Every so often people question my Christian faith. Here’s what I believe: I believe in God, the Father almighty,creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord,who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,born of the Virgin Mary,suffered under Pontius Pilate,was crucified, died, and was buried;he descended to the dead.On the third day he rose again;he ascended into heaven,he is seated at the right hand of the Father,and he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit,the holy Christian church,the communion of saints,the forgiveness of sins,the resurrection of the body,and the life everlasting. Amen. This creed was the…
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About Trayvon and George
To my friends and family on Facebook who keep posting stuff to me on how George Zimmerman was innocent, Trayvon Martin was a thug, and that you also cannot understand why Black people are so upset over the loss of life of some kid in Florida. You’re not listening. You’re not listening to the people across the nation who have had this experience, multiple times, in their lives and the lives of their families and friends. You’re not listening to the mothers and fathers who do not know, day to day, whether their kids leaving for school in the morning will make it back home without harm. You’re not listening…
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Paula Deen and the Unfortunate Change in Acceptable Words
Yes, we swim in a sea of racism. Yes, we pick it up. Yes, we even continue it. But we are human adults with minds and (I believe) the ability to choose different behaviors when instructed and led based upon what are (to my mind) better values. When someone raised me as a kid to be “good,” it meant being kind and honest and giving and caring. I don’t know if I already was “good,” and that was just instructions on how to do it, or whether I really wasn’t “good,” and the practice I did to follow the external rules molded my character. In either case, I turned out…
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Christians, Gays, and Jesus
I wrote this in response to a great essay by a pastor I respect. He went through a hard time figuring out what he thought about gays and Christianity; as I thought about what he wrote (see here) [Ed: the post along with the site have since been erased] I responded with these words: The only sin I read about in Scriptures that is unforgivable is one: the sin of blaspheming the Holy Spirit of God, and I think it applies to the idea that the work of God cannot effect salvation. The only person in Scripture that I read about who could not be saved was one: a rich…
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At One Time
Today Monty talked about a difficult term, “Atonement,” and brought out several ideas about what this means. I think most of us don’t think too much about this idea, and when we do, it’s with the vague sense that we’re swimming in rivers too cold and too deep for our water wings. I’m not going to try to re-explain what Monty said, as you can go listen to him online. It’s really quite excellent. What I do want to raise is the question of “Now that we know what it means, what do we do about it?” Or, more accurately, what am I going to do about it? I can…
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The Key to Being a Productive Writer
There is one key thing to do when you want to be a productive writer. You simply write. And write and write and write. I had not worked on my latest MS (tentatively titled “Many Waters”) for about 2 months. It was a NaNoWriMo effort, and after NaNoWriMo was over, I just couldn’t look at it. It was nothing like what I wanted. I know what I want the book to be about, and yet it just is so squirrelly. I have so many dead ends and so many terribly overwritten parts. But you know, the secret is simply to keep writing until the main story is done. So that’s…
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Cookie Cutter
We step into a river, we believers, when we first decide to follow Jesus. The river is the great flow of believers from all nations and all times, a river that started thousands of years ago and that continues today, with a vast congregation of people called by God and living in his name. We step into the river and there are so many who already are swimming, confident, powerful, assured of their journey, and it can be intimidating. So what we do is we copy what they’re doing. “Fake it ’til you make it” is a good motto, and it works. Along the way, though, sometimes we forget the…
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Arms and the Man
If a foreign nation invaded America and as a result, 20 people every day were killed, at random, and no place was safe in America from violence–you could be dragged out and killed in your school, your home, your church, your mall, your car, in the park or on the street or at the movies or standing in line waiting for a burger–we would be at a near-riot condition, demanding our national defense do something to protect us from this daily violence which kills our mothers, our children, our wives, our brothers, our friends, our leaders, our pastors, our politicians, our police officers, our fathers, our sons, and us.Instead–we shrug…
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Awash in a Sea of Tears
Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthian Believers, Chapter 10, lines 3-6 “For though we walk in the flesh, we are not waging war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience, when your obedience is complete.” (ESV) “The truth is that, although of course we lead normal human lives, the battle we are fighting is on the spiritual level. The very weapons we use are not those of human…
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God and Newtown
To my fellow Christians who are posting that “Newtown is God’s judgment on America for taking prayer out of schools”— I’m not speaking for God here, for my church, my religion, or anything official. I’m just speaking for me. But I want you just to stop. Stop. Right. Now. God doesn’t kill twenty kindergartners to prove a point. He didn’t cause bullets to rip through their bodies to “show us what happens” when we take God out of our schools. He didn’t put Victoria Soto in the way of death to prove to us that only the Christian religion could save us. A man with a gun did this. A…
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A Poem for Advent
America 2012 Twenty children were shot Charlotte Bacon, 6and six adults in one of Daniel Barden, 7the greatest tragedies Olivia Engel, 6in American history. Josephine Gay, 7Unfortunately, it was Ana M. Marquez-Greene, 6not the greatest tragedy, Dylan Hockley, 6for we have had mass Madeleine F. Hsu, 6shootings in Columbine Catherine V. Hubbard, 6and Virginia Tech and Chase Kowalski, 7Aurora and Portland and… Jesse Lewis, 6The list goes on and on, James Mattioli, 6and while we are sometimes Grace McDonnell, 7speechless and sometimes Emilie Parker, 6saddened, it is never enough Jack Pinto, 6to move us to take action. Noah Pozner, 6We think we are powerless Caroline Previdi, 6against guns,…
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Words and Actions
Indeed I tremble for my country when i reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep for ever
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Sabbatical
If we want to have a time of rest, we have to be willing to have the wind stopped.
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Losing My Religion Pt 3
I’m saying that this isn’t a lecture where an expert is advising you. I’m saying this is a lecture of someone saying “All of life is at your fingertips. Go for it. Don’t settle for less.”
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Losing My Religion Pt 2
I get it that people think that Christianity is like any other religion, or that it is only a religion. It is that—a religion.
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Losing My Religion Pt 1
People lie. Societies crumble. Businesses fail. Political parties speak one thing but pursue an opposite agenda. These are our gods, and they are proved not to be so much lies as they are simply untrustworthy—literally not worthy of our trust. Not worthy of us.
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Three Is the Magic Number
Three is the magic number. Our third annual Word Jazz festival takes place at Boxley’s, a jazz club in North Bend, Washington, on April 10, 2012, at 7:00 p.m. You should make reservations. Hope to see you there.
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The Communion of the Saints
What kind of people participate in the communion of the saints?
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The Writing Finger Having Mov’d Writes On
The art of building the story through the use of counters, blanks, and empty spaces gives room for the story to build and to breathe.
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People of the Book
It’s odd how most of us only know what’s between page 1, far behind us, and page yet-to-be-determined, perhaps only a little ways before us, where our present life concludes and the book closes with a final snap.
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Book Review: Slavery by Another Name
Much of the success of the South around the turn of the last century can be traced to rise of industry centered in Birmingham, Alabama and in the cotton industry before the arrival of the boll weevil; this book helps explain how these riches were accumulated and who benefited.
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Beauty and Ashes
I do not know if you can admit you’ve lived through that time, where beauty has changed to ashes. Often there is no safe place to have that discussion because life demands that you act as if life holds only beauty. There are chores and tasks to take care of. There are family members to support. Life goes on like a train, and there is never a cord to pull to say “Stop!” Whether you speak out or not—life goes on.
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Sunday Words, Monday Deeds
I suspect that some of you are in the same boat with me. Thinking, “Lord, are you really calling me?” Because the awful reality is dawning that he is asking us to follow—to really follow – him.
