thought

Steve & the Holy Spirit

Monday, May 5, 2025

Steve Calos was a character. He was a Greek American United Methodist minister with Greek Orthodox cousins, Baptist cousins, Pentecostal cousins, Methodist cousins, and Catlick (Catholic in Greek American) cousins. He had a wicked sense of humor and a passion for pastoral ministry. Steve was also immensely practical and didn’t much mix with holy roller types. While he was extroverted and effusive, I’d guess he was allergic to Christianese and wasn’t one to see angels and demons behind every rock and tree.

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Ten Years Later

Sunday, January 12, 2025

Ten years ago, on the Saturday before Christmas, 2014, I woke in a state of intense fear. This was both unexpected and the culmination of of years of anxiety and frustration. While it felt like the end of my world at the time, the changes I had to make in order to recover were the end of a lot of unhealthy thoughts and habits and the beginning of living a much healthier and happier life.

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Myth

Monday, January 6, 2025

Listening to the story of the Magi this morning, I was prompted ponder again, how do I believe. I struggle even to explain the question: It is practical. It is not hypothetical. I am trying to determine how to approach faith and scripture in ways that are both respectful and realistic. What hermeneutic do I use to understand passages that are likely ahistorical? What value can I derive from archetypal stories?

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Prune My Priorities

Wednesday, August 28, 2024

This is a phrase has been part of the week’s prayer of approach from Lectio365: Lord, as I meditate on your word and learn from your Church, teach me what it means to “pray without ceasing” ( 1Thess 5:17 ). Holy Spirit, wake me up to your constant presence and prune my priorities so I can go further in prayer-fueled mission. Prune is a wonderful, positive word to express trimming back our commitments and activities to strengthen that which is most likely to flower and bear fruit.

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Caste

Saturday, August 17, 2024

I’m reading Caste by Isabel Wilkerson because she is coming to speak at the University this fall, and I just finished the chapter, The Container We Have Built for You. Lordy, but that was a tough slog. Not because the material was too academic or hard to understand—to the contrary, Wilkerson is an experienced journalist and writes beautiful and accessible prose. No, the issue was that what she wrote was all too plain and, to me, familiar because of the study I have done.

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Digging In Again

Wednesday, August 14, 2024

Good lord, do I want to do this? I imported my State of Faith and Saving My Faith documents from Ulysses into Obsidian, along with most of my State of Faith notes, with the idea that I’d like to develop that more and possibly even finish it. It’ll be different than it would have been if I’d finished it a year ago, and even some of what I’d polished will change.

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What Do I Want?

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Seriously. What do I want from God? Let me take a step back. The question of what I want arises from losing any certainty about God and faith. I know what I was taught, but my assurance that what I was taught was true was vaporized in the implosion of American Evangelicalism and its nearly unanimous support for a troop of horribly behaved goons led by Donald Trump. I still believe there is a God, and I believe that God does not endorse coarse, philandering bullies as leadership material.

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Advent

Tuesday, November 7, 2023

This post isn’t ready for prime time. It’s not even half baked. It’s still fluid. I want to write about Advent because it’s coming. I want to write about Advent because it implies the incarnation, which is my all-time favorite doctrine. Incarnation is important because it is God the creator entering creation in order to be in community with us. Incarnation is the transcendent becoming immanent. The incarnation is God entering all the messiness of human life.

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Resurrection

Tuesday, September 12, 2023

Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. (Rachel Held Evans: Searching for Sunday (2015), p. 38) I find the cosmological argument for the existence of God convincing—I can’t conceive of a universe without a first cause. I can believe in the Trinity. I can believe in creation, so long as you give me longer than six days. I struggle with divine intervention in the world, not because I don’t believe God is capable but because of the problem of evil it raises.

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Karens

Friday, August 18, 2023

A woman driving a minivan nearly hit my daughter on her bicycle today at an intersection where the entrance to a gated community crosses the Virginia Capital Trail. Then she had the gall to honk at her. I pulled in front of her car and let her know very firmly (without profanity) that cars are legally required to yield to cyclists in a crosswalk, even if there is an (unofficial) stop sign on the trail.

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John 3:16

Thursday, August 17, 2023

For God so loved the world. Not all the white American Christians. Not all the people who loved him. Not even all the people. The World. The Cosmos. All of it. God loves creation, because it is good. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world [κόσμος/cosmos] that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

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Unsaying "God"

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

David James Duncan speaks of “unsaying God”, that is, apophasis—theology defined by what God is not. God has been badly defined by so many people and so many traditions that we need to strip the baggage away from the name and treat it as we would any other—someone we are getting to know. I had much the same thought yesterday, then lost it, so I was happy to read it again in God Laughs & Plays.

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Curious, not Confused

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

I’ve been thinking about my approach to faith and how I am unsure of anything anymore, and I’m wondering how to describe it. Am I confused? I don’t think so. Confusion implies some level of discomfort, and I’m remarkably mellow about this. Perhaps my attempts to learn mindfulness have taken hold enough that I’m simply noticing and wondering—exploring the possibilities. I can be obsessively curious, but this doesn’t even feel like that.

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