Christian Carnival CXLVI is now up, hosted by Evangelical Ecologist. I’ll take a close look at it once my Threads and Participatory Bible Study blogs are back from the never-never land of server problems. I apologize to anyone who tried to come here while the server was down, but at this point we’re temporarily redirected…
These notes are intended to accompany my podcast A Question of Authority. Interpretations of this passage tend to focus on the conflict and how Jesus got out of it. He did, indeed, avoid a difficult situation in a very creative way. But there is an additional realm of discussion. Jesus suggested an entirely different way…
Translation and Notes These notes relate to and expand on my podcast Seeing Stewardship as God Sees It. 41And he sat down by the treasury, and he was watching how the crowd threw money into the contribution box. And many rich people threw in lots! Treasury . . . is apparently the hall named from…
In today’s Christmas sermon our pastor told a story he’s told before, but with a slightly different slant, and that reminded me of a number of things I’ve been thinking about over the last couple of weeks. Let me be clear that I’m not criticizing the pastor for telling the story with a different slant….
James McGrath has posted a Challenge to Anti-Intellectual Christian Fundamentalists. I think it’s a good one. I posted on this before, though from a different angle. I want to highlight here an important question. Where in scripture or Christian tradition do we get a high value for intellectual independence? Certainly there is a value for…
The following working translation and notes accompany my podcast Cleansing the Temple. 15Then they went into Jerusalem, and after they entered the temple he began to throw out those who were selling and buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and up-ended those of the dove sellers. The problem…