What this Unruly Father Learned from His Unruly Child
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 →A Black Guy Starts Talking to Two White Guys at an Atlanta Food Mart … I Couldn’t Believe What Happened Next
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 →The Problem of Evil has an “Evil” Problem
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 →Jesus is Dead, Long Live Jesus
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 →Reading to the End: Why Most Christians Would Be Atheists if They Knew Only a Little More
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 →Training Wheels for the Infinite; Or, Why I Tremble on a Roof and Slumber in a Plane
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 →Why Tolstoy Was Wrong about Happiness: A Review of Deep Sea Diver, SECRETS
In a roundabout way, SECRETS, Deep Sea Diver’s second full-length album proves that Tolstoy’s adage about happy families might be exactly wrong.
Continue reading →On Left-Handed Drinking Fountains and Not Making it Into Gideon’s Army
Back while I was attending college almost a decade ago, I had a very awkward experience once with a drinking fountain that shot water from the left side rather than the right. I found myself incapable of drinking water from it, slurping and lapping awkwardly with little success. I hadn’t really thought about it before […]
Continue reading →God, I Thank You that I am Not Like this Pharisee
I was thinking this morning about the phrase “But for the grace of God, go I.” Along with a number of other Christian clichés, this one tends to be trotted out in public during dubious shows of humility. And, also similar to other Christian clichés, “but for the grace of God, go I” is hard for […]
Continue reading →Is it Possible to Redeem the Comments Section?
A lot of reasonable people on the internet just avoid the comments section altogether. But is there some way to redeem it?
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