R confessed to the leadership of our church that he was gay. He also professed to believing in Christ and wanting to change. He had been attending our church for several months, but R kept falling back into old habits, going to a local gay bar, and succumbing to sin. I’d been a Christian for [...]
It’s becoming trendy to have an “open communion” policy. Just as forgiveness is freely extended to all, they say, so the communion table should be open to all. Last month, Minnesota became the 12th state to legalize same-sex marriage. In commemoration, at the inaugural service of Revolution Church Minnesota, Jay Bakker marked the occasion by [...]
Novelist and freelancer Stuart Sharp recently had to issue an apology for a piece in The Story Hub entitled Talking Sci-Fi Romance in which he postulated that the next big thing in science fiction is Sci-Fi Romance. In the same way that romance writers took to writing Urban Fantasy, eventually forming an entirely new genre [...]
In the four Gospels, there are more accounts of demonic encounters than anywhere else in Scripture. Sometimes the symptoms of “demonization” included medical conditions (blindness, muteness, epileptic seizures, etc.), sometimes madness and mental derangement (Mk. 5:1-20), sometimes impassioned resistance to the preaching of the Gospel. But the one thing you can’t do is to read [...]
Yesterday at church, the worship team sang How Deep the Father’s Love for Us. The song is labeled a “contemporary hymn.” While written in the 1990s, it employs the vernacular of traditional hymns. Here’s the first few stanzas: How deep the Father’s love for us, How vast beyond all measure That He should give His only [...]
Last week, during my interview for this show, I was asked several questions about zombies in culture. Have they supplanted vampires in popularity? Why is the public so fascinated with the undead right now? I’m no expert on zombies (except the ones I work with), but am fascinated by the trend. Especially its religious overtones. [...]
I left the ministry for a job in the “secular” world. And it was the best thing that ever happened to my ministry. You see, all those years huddled around Christians, entrenched in evangelical culture, interacting mostly with those who thought like me, those who shared my beliefs, values, and terminology, those who rarely challenged [...]
CAUTION: The following is a work of satire. Any similarity to THIS POST is strictly intentional. Naturalists, Religious Progressives, and Persons who are easily offended by any suggestion that Science is NOT the infallible Holy Grail are encouraged to huff and puff about illiterates like me who pose such a great threat to American survival [...]
I know two novelists who quit their day jobs to pursue a career in writing. One of them was forced to return to their day job because they weren’t making enough off their books to pay their i4mt car insurance and other bills. People don´t know this, but they can get cheap car insurance at [...]
Horror fiction generally comes in two brands — Man vs. Cosmos / Nature Good vs. Evil The first tends to be bleak, pragmatic, nihilistic, more about survival rather than idealistic or moral perpetuity. The second frames the struggle in bigger terms, like the pursuit or defense of Innocence, Love, Existential Meaning, Heaven, Hell, Destiny, or [...]
