February 2012
2 posts
Fotoshop by Adobé →
Great video by Jesse Rosten:
This commercial isn’t real, neither are society’s standards of beauty.
(via Kelli Lane on Darling Magazine)
The Great Divorce →
Any article which finds a decent reuse for a C. S. Lewis book title deserves at least a cursory review. David Brooks actually does a pretty good job with it:
Murray’s story contradicts the ideologies of both parties. Republicans claim that America is threatened by a decadent cultural elite that corrupts regular Americans, who love God, country and traditional values. That story is false. The...
January 2012
1 post
A Parable About the Church →
Donald Miller:
Jack was born to be a dentist. Both his mother and father were dentists and from an early age they took Jack with them once a week to their local dental school. Even as a child Jack loved dental school because of the children’s program where kids gathered in colorful rooms and listened to well-mannered teachers read ancient stories about famous dentists, pioneer dentists who...
December 2011
7 posts
Merry →
Simply beautiful.
Xmas, Crissmas, and Grace Bombs →
It is a longstanding Christmas tradition of mine to share C. S. Lewis’s playfully satirical essay called “Xmas and Christmas”. (Hint: it’s not about word choice.) I can’t think of a more appropriate tradition to be sharing with you this year than a reminder of the “reason for the season”. Go ahead and read it. I will be here when you get back.
I had the...
Christmas Grace Bomb
There is an outlaw preacher who is struggling this Christmas. She has three kids: a nineteen month old girl, a three year old boy, and a thirteen year old girl. She lost her job, and her husband’s hours were recently cut. I just found out that she applied for help through a local church for an “Adopt-A-Family” type program that gave gift cards to struggling families for...
An Evangelical Remembers His Friend Hitchens →
Larry Taunton, endearingly, on Christopher Hitchens:
The debate over, I crossed the stage to shake Christopher’s hand. “You were quite good tonight,” he said with a charming smile as he accepted my proffered hand. “I think they enjoyed us.”
Sadly, all future such debates must go off without a Hitch.
We were never meant to die.
Indonesia's Aceh punks shaved for 're-education' →
Karishma Vaswani, for BBC Asia:
Dozens of young men and women have been detained for being “punk” and disturbing the peace in Aceh, Indonesia’s most devoutly Muslim province. They are being held in a remedial school, where they are undergoing “re-education”.
Unreal.
Leaving on a Jet Plane to Meet People from Twitter →
Deanna Ogle on Outlaw Preachers (re)Union 2011:
The first hour or two was awkward for me, but instead of getting uncomfortable hello’s from people I got warm hugs and bright greetings from everybody.
Ain’t no huggin’ like outlaw huggin’.
On the Efficacy of Prayer
God seems to do nothing of himself which he can possibly delegate to His creatures. He commands us to do slowly and blunderingly what he could do perfectly and in the twinkling of an eye. He allows us to neglect what he would have us do, or to fail. Perhaps we do not fully realize the problem, so to call it, of enabling finite free wills to co-exist with Omnipotence. It seems to involve at every...
November 2011
2 posts
“Anger is the most impotent of passions. It effects nothing it goes about, and...”
– Carl Sandburg
1 tag
A Tale of a Farmer’s Bailout
A man is lost in a rural area and stops at a farm to get directions. As he is talking to the farmer he notices a pig with a wooden leg. “How did the pig get a wooden leg?” he asks the farmer.
“Well”, says the farmer, “that is a very special pig. One night not too long ago we had a fire start in the barn. Well, sir, that pig set up a great squealing that woke everyone, and by the time we got...
September 2011
1 post
The Trouble with X
Excerpt from C. S. Lewis
I suppose I may assume that seven out of ten of those who read these lines are in some kind of difficulty about some other human being. Either at work or at home, either the people who employ you or those whom you employ, either those who share your house or those whose house you share, either your in-laws or parents or children, your wife or your husband, are making...
August 2011
6 posts
You're the Ones →
Marc Hedlund on Steve Jobs, but, more than that, on leadership:
Steve let the applause go on for a little bit, then, with much effort, settled down the crowd. When things got quiet, the first thing he said was: “That’s an awful lot of applause considering that you guys are the ones who do all the work.”
Humility looks good on you. Yeah, you.
That truck driver you flipped off? Let me tell you... →
We never know what someone else is going through.
“Now there is a final reason I think that Jesus says, “Love your...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving Your Enemies,” Sermon Delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
“Kill Them With Kindness™ is a proven, effective solution to pretty much every...”
– David Teare
The Real Gay Agenda →
I knew it.
The Fence
In the Second World War, a group of soldiers was fighting in the rural countryside of France. During an intense battle, one of the American soldiers was killed. His comrades did not want to leave his body on the battlefield and decided to give him a Christian burial. They remembered a church a few miles behind the front lines whose grounds included a small cemetery surrounded by a white fence....
A Billion Dollars Isn’t Cool. You Know What’s... →
And therein lies the real problem of web 2.0 — whether it takes the form of SEO-driven “news” or crowd-sourced accommodation. To make money — real money — at this game you have to attract millions, or tens of millions, of users. And when you’re dealing with those kinds of numbers, it’s literally impossible not to treat your users as pieces of data. It’s ironic, but depressingly unsurprising,...
July 2011
4 posts
Assume Positive Intent →
I think assuming positive intent can be extended to all people regardless of age. Each of us is trying to make things work for us in the only ways we know how. These ways may be woefully misguided at times, but that doesn’t make the need we’re trying to meet any less valid.
Martin Luther’s explanation of the eighth commandment — “You must not testify falsely against your...
“When King Darius decreed that no one would be able to pray to any god or human,...”
– Brandon Mouser
Is Negativity Bad for Your Soul?
“It has always been a mystery to me how men can feel themselves honored by the humiliation of their fellow beings.” — Gandhi
A friend at work just gave me a link to this brilliant article Kathy Sierra wrote. In it, she outlines what many of us already know: angry people make people angry. What is fascinating is the science behind it.
There is now strong evidence to suggest that...
June 2011
3 posts
Samuel L. Jackson Reads ‘Go the Fuck to Sleep’ →
Get your free copy of the audiobook from Audible.
You’re welcome, parents.
God’s Away on Business →
What can I say? It’s Tom Waits.
Pauley Perrette on Faith →
There was a while there where I just had gone through a gap there where I felt like I didn’t know how to pray, so I decided whenever I was going to pray, I would just say, ‘Thank you for everything and forgive me for everything.’
May 2011
4 posts
Rick Welts, Phoenix Suns President, Comes Out →
Last month, in a Midtown office adorned with sports memorabilia, two longtime friends met for a private talk. David Stern, the commissioner of the National Basketball Association, sipped his morning coffee, expecting to be asked for career advice. Across from him sat Rick Welts, the president and chief executive of the Phoenix Suns, who had come to New York not to discuss careers, but to say,...
1 tag
Outcasts and Outlaws: Part 2
Wherein Chris...
Osama bin Laden News Headlines →
It’s worse than I thought.
That Reminds Me →
I wrote most of this ten years ago.
April 2011
11 posts
Outlaw Preachers Podcast: I Quit Church →
We’re at it again.
Medical Account of Crucifixion
Various forms of this article have been circulating for years and are attributed to Dr. C. Truman Davis. Davis is or was allegedly an ophthalmologist who has been said to be on the board of, the vice president of, or somehow involved in a number of ophthalmology organizations as well as a pastor, teacher, or simply a supporter or Christian education. While I couldn’t find any hard evidence...
We Disagree on Homosexuality →
I have yet to find a more pastoral tone on this topic than from Brian McLaren. I love this man:
We all come to this issue with many assumptions. Some of those assumptions aren’t even apparent to us. When we surface the assumptions, we can at least discover where our deeper disagreements lie.
Shockingly, he advocates a starting point of love and compassion.
Weird, right?
Apple Employees: It Gets Better →
Apple employees for The Trevor Project:
The bullies seem like the powerful people and the successful people, and the secret of the real world is: they’re at the peak of their power at 15 and 16. There will come a time when the bullies are not successful and the people they bullied are.
“It got so much better than I ever thought would be possible.”
1 tag
Worth Risking For
“At the heart of the worldview...
Jay Bakker: It’s Still Grace →
I just posted the audio of Jay speaking last Saturday in Santa Ana. He was as hilarious as he was inspiring. I’m glad you exist, Jay.
How To Steal Like An Artist →
Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout, with a list of 10 things he wishes someone told him while he was in college, including a bit of wisdom from Ecclesiastes:
That which has been is what will be, That which is done is what will be done, And there is nothing new under the sun.
Don’t forget to make something today.
(stolen from Marco Arment)
“I was originally taught to read Paul as if he were writing ‘2...”
– Brian McLaren
Brian McLaren on Rob Bell’s “Love Wins” →
He (and many of us) may be wrong, but if we’re wrong, it’s not simply because we are trying to pander to “contemporary culture” …
“You might be one of the Outlaw Preachers if you still contemplate the question, ‘What if I’m wrong?’”
Porn and Paper Pastors →
Dan Phillips wrote a great post comparing the fantasies we have which involve pornographic performers to the fantasies we have about the pastors who author our favorite books. Clever and astute.
Nobody can compete with a fantasy.
Stop competing with the world on the world’s terms, and stop competing with fantasy pastors (or measuring your real pastor against your fantasy one). Nobody...
Success, and Farming vs. Mining →
I’m not sure what sort of success we should be striving for in ministry, but Wil Shipley’s comparison of farming and mining strikes me as pertinent whatever your definition.
If you farm, you’ll have to purchase seed up-front, and work on it for a season before you see any profits. And every season you’ll plow most the profits (literally) back into the land and salaries and your...
'Radical' Preachers Buck Mainstream Christianity →
They don’t carry pistols or wear 10-gallon hats.
Although you are welcome even if you do.
March 2011
10 posts
Walk on Water →
This film is based on a true story. In 1986 a football team that lived on a little island in the south of Thailand called “Koh Panyee”. It’s a floating village in the middle of the sea that has not an inch of soil. The kids here loved to watch football but had nowhere to play or practice. But they didn’t let that stop them.
May you play barefoot every day of your...
Single and Evangelical? →
An otherwise uninspired piece about difficulties finding a job as a single pastor contains this morsel that cuts right to the quick of it:
Some religion experts suggested a less charitable reason for the marriage requirement: the expectation that a pastor’s wife will provide unpaid labor, perhaps leading the choir or teaching Sunday school.
Then again…
R. Albert Mohler Jr.,...
Japan Before and After Tsunami →
Unreal.
Matthew Harrison on Lutheranism 101 →
This video is representative of one of the reasons why I do not consider myself a Missouri Synod Lutheran.
“Women are really pretty important,” he says. Then he laughs. It’s a joke. Get it?
I didn’t laugh either.
(cf. The Most Important Rule to a Healthy Baptist Marriage)
Fred Rogers Archive Interview →
Mister Rogers on faith, Henri Nouwen, television, and whimsy.
“What a difference one person can make in the life of another. … That’s not anything you can do yourself. The Holy Spirit informs and sends out our simple messages.”
Indeed.
Why Men Should Not Be Ordained →
I can’t believe some churches are still ordaining men. It’s an outrage.
1 tag
Unity in Diversity
Wherein the prodigal son...
