Once, when I was three or four, I came into the kitchen while my mother was washing dishes to tell her about my new toy car—how the steering wheel actually turned the front wheels, how the doors and even the hood and trunk opened. It was made of metal, with good heft. It was a […]
Continue reading →The greatest gift my father ever gave me freed me from years and years of bitterness, resentment, and addiction to failure.
Continue reading →Us to God: “It would bring me joy to see you suffer as I have suffered.”
God to Us: “I will gladly bear your suffering to bring you joy.”
An early adoption of Christian rationalism had me operating as a psychopath. Does the Bible give primacy to reason? Should the church?
Continue reading →Memorizing Bible verses with my kids is one of the most frustrating and rewarding things I do. One of my kids particularly tests and teaches me.
Continue reading →Last night, I was hanging out in southwest Atlanta with my friend Ben Hodges, who is actually the whitest kid I know. For example, I went over to his house so we could make a night of it going over my proposed edits for a chapter of his memoirs. I showed up around nine o’clock […]
Continue reading →Whether it’s framed by heated personal anecdotes or cool-headed syllogisms, the problem of evil has always posed the thorniest challenge to belief in the Christian God. It runs something like this: The Bible says God is omnipotent, omniscient, and good. Yet there is evil in the world. So the Bible must be wrong about God: […]
Continue reading →In August of 1867, Fyodor Dostoevsky made a special stop with his wife Anna Grigorievna to see a painting. We know this from an entry she made in her diary: On the way to Geneva, we stopped for a day in Basel, with the purpose of seeing a painting in the museum there that my […]
Continue reading →Bryan John Appleby’s debut LP, Fire on the Vine, opens with “Noah’s Nameless Wife,” a deeply disturbing personal portrait of Noah’s Flood. If you haven’t listened to it before, go ahead and do that. I’ll wait. Imagine the tumult of countless men, women, and children crying, moaning, and groaning into the air above the rising […]
Continue reading →I have often wondered why I feel more palpable fear while standing safely on the roof of a building than I do while looking out the window of a plane. In rational terms, I can easily comprehend that floating in what amounts to a closed metal tube a few thousand feet above ground is more […]
Continue reading →