Our stuff is killing us. The average American home includes more than 300,000 individual items. Our closets average 103 individual items per person, even though we only wear twenty percent of our wardrobe with regularity. According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Americans collectively spend more than $1.2 trillion on nonessential goods. The…
Continue reading ➞ Less Is More: Reclaiming Christian Simplicity from the American Dream
Have you ever been embarrassed by something in the Bible? Or wished the Bible just left some stuff out? And I'm not talking about a hard teaching on money or a convicting verse about orphans and widows, but one of those passages that makes you pause and go, "Uh-oh." Like, you're chugging along on your…
Continue reading ➞ The Good Book, or How I Learned to Stop Defending and Love the Bible
It is, without a doubt, the most famous death in all of history. And yet, when some of us see the cross, we may see an archaic story wrapped around a barbaric torture device that has no bearing on our present reality. When others of us see the cross, you may literally see your shame.…
Continue reading ➞ The Story of the Cross We Rarely Talk About: A Fresh Perspective
In the poetic opening of Genesis, the Bible says God formed man out of the dust. Dust. Cosmologist Carl Sagan famously said, "We are made of starstuff." Stardust. It is both incredibly humbling and beautiful to recognize the God of the cosmos crafted our bodies out of the same material found at the heart of…
Continue reading ➞ Dark Days, Starry Skies: Hope in the Aftermath of the Presidential Election
On Thursday, July 7th, two very different - but interconnected - events occurred and much of the United States had not only a front-row seat to the carnage, but also an opinion. Straddled by two police officers, I watched four bullets punch into Alton Sterling’s chest. In the unflinchingly graphic cellphone video, he twitched and…
Continue reading ➞ Bleed, America: The Decline of Empathatic Discourse and How to Reverse It
During the 12th Century, crusaders often hired mercenaries to fight in their stead during the Crusades. Because the Crusades were viewed as a religious undertaking, the mercenaries had to be baptized before being deployed to the Holy Land.
One of the greatest crises facing my generation today is our aversion to authenticity. Which is odd considering how much time we spend talking about ourselves. At no point in history do we have as much control over the image we present to the world than we do now. But more often than not, that…
Instrument of Mercy 