The following is an excerpt from a chapter that I am contributing to a book about and by evangelicals who fell through the bottom of their faith and deconstructed hard....
The Prodigal God: A Parable for Today
A long time ago, there was peace between God and humanity. They were happy together. In fact, you could hardly distinguish one from the other, for God walked among her...
Partying As the Bullets Fly: The Absurdity of Prophetic Fulfillment Without Justice
While the United States celebrates the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the Israeli army shot and murdered 58 Palestinians. Yesterday Israel celebrated its 70th anniversary...
From Blue Collar Calvinist to Lutheran Pastor: “I’ve Found the Freedom to Love”
My friend, Dwaine Sutherland, was ordained in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) this weekend in Minnesota. I’ve known Dwaine for some years and from the first moment I...
What To Do When God is Unfaithful?
What To Do When God is Unfaithful We often talk about human unfaithfulness. Novels become bestsellers partly to the extent their plots involve the right amounts of betrayal, infidelity, and...
Freedom and Law: Moving Beyond the Secular-Religious Divide
Europe has abandoned religion at a very fundamental level and on a widespread scale. Religion no longer provides an interpretive framework for how the world fits together. It no longer...
On Being Post-Evangelical: Moving Beyond the Anger of “Post-ness”
This article is the fourth and final installment of my series on evangelicalism. The central question is whether there is faith after evangelicalism and a theology to support it. Obviously,...
Atheism as Salvation: Passing Through the Door of Liberation
Not too long ago I had an interesting conversation with a long lost friend who had become an atheist. As we reminisced long-forgotten memories we also had to talk about...
It Takes Racism to Explain Away Racism
Why is it so hard to overcome racism? It is strange that in a world where most people tend to agree that racism is a bad thing, there is still...
Jesus, Me, And the Other: Evangelicalism and White Privilege
I’ve been an evangelical Christian all of my life. Though I’ve drifted away from much of what goes under the flag of evangelicalism certain emphases of the movement will remain...
“A Perfect Circle” as Public Theology
When the word theology is mentioned people either have no idea what you are talking about or they think you’re talking about something religious. This week I listened to the...
I Believe in Predestination But God Has Nothing To Do With It!
Actually, I don’t believe in predestination. We are not robots! I hate predestination and consider it one of the great heretical ideas that have crept into Christian theology, first by...
A Sundered Cross: Evangelicalism and the Public Sphere
A Devotional on the Cross Imagine a cross. The cross has a vertical pole and a crossbar. It is not hard to imagine the vertical pole representing the dynamic between...
Why Christianity is Not About Having a Personal Relationship With God
A few years ago, I saw a post on Facebook that asserted that what makes Christianity stand out from other religions is that Christian have a personal relationship with God....
How to Live as a Christian in a Non-Christian World: Learning to Embrace Pluralism
This article was published a few years ago as two shorter articles at Relevant.com. Waking Up to A Non-Christian World We live in weird times. Almost every day we are...