Recent comments by presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann have stirred up the discussion about gay marriage once again. While speaking to a group of high school…
Images Of Life
The summer staff eats dinner together every night. We talk about the evening program and our days with the groups. There comes a breaking point where laughter erupts and the conversation devolves into mindless rumble. Last week, this laughter evolved into playful criticism towards me. I lead the music for the evening program and I am not ashamed to say I pick songs that are indie. You know, songs from bands that no one has ever heard of or songs originally sung in different languages? The staff complained of hearing the same songs each week, although the youth love the songs that I play and every week sing with a different group. They called me a pseudo-hipster, which infuriated...
Women are typically infinitely more creative than men. I think that can be proven through the dreams we have. Allison and I try to share our dreams each day from the night before. Here’s the conversation we just had. Be warned. Her dreams go on for a long time. And feel free to analyze it. Ray: Hey, sweetie, I had this amazing dream last night. You ever… Allison: Oh, let me tell you about my dream. I dreamt we had adopted a little girl from Fiji, but we hadn’t legally adopted her. The courts were letting us have her until...
Benetton clothing has a new campaign out called the Unhate Campaign. The images of the campaign show high profile enemies kissing each other. In most cases the two enemies are men. One includes President Obama and one includes the Pope.The images aren’t sexual in nature, but they are provoketive. They stir something in us, not just from an artistic boundary breaking standpoint, but from the possibility of what the image actually means. While the images are meant to shock us, its bold to suggest that enemies could actually reconcile. Our imagination runs wild when we consider that peace isn’t just...
This is one of the coolest things I’ve seen this year. The people at OpenBible charted the emotional content of the Bible from beginning to end and created an infographic. “Things start off well with creation, turn negative with Job and the patriarchs, improve again with Moses, dip with the period of the judges, recover with David, and have a mixed record (especially negative when Samaria is around) during the monarchy. The exilic period isn’t as negative as you might expect, nor the return period as positive. In the New Testament, things start off fine with Jesus, then quickly turn...
Log In
Please log into the site.
Top Conversations
While recently visiting a (Won) Buddhist temple, I heard one practitioner refer to Jesus as a Buddha. I was struck by the generosity of calling…
Before I was married, my hairdresser—a divorced man—told me about a woman in her sixties who explained to him the meaning of marriage, the breakdown…
I sat in the minister’s office on a Wednesday night, nervous with my parents seated on either side of me. “Why now?” he asked. “I’m…
A little while ago, I had a very deep conversation with some friends about women in the church. One of my friends strongly holds to…
As I look out into the faces of the people in the congregation I’m speaking to on any particular Sunday, I think to myself once…
I’ve been hearing about a book making the rounds, Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James. Naturally, being a writer and voracious reader, I…
Feminism to me is the crazy belief that women and men are both created in God’s image and that each of us deserves a life…
The parable of the talents, we have been told, is a parable about personal responsibility, a warning of the terrible consequences of squandering our God-given…
This week, a dad disciplined his daughter. And at the time of me writing this piece, that discipline has been viewed over 14 million times….
