Monday often means stress, deadlines, burdens, and anxiety. It becomes the day when we dread the overly cheerful coworker who makes our day worse by suggesting, “Sounds like somebody has a cased of the Mondays.”
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Theology
Noah is one of those Bible characters that we love to tell our children about. We sing songs about the arky, we remake movies based on his life, and we lift him up as one of the early heroes of the faith. And in many ways, he is a hero. But there’s also a part of the story that we tend to leave out.
Renee Alston, in the book Stumbling Toward Faith, begins her story with these disturbing words:
“I grew up in an abusive household."
One of the most frequent recommendations within Christian traditions when dealing with habitual sin is to have an accountability partner. If you’re unfamiliar with the jargon, an accountability partner is a friend, preferably of the same gender, who struggles with a similar sin who will routinely check in with you to see whether or not you are having success in your battle against sin.
In Luther’s day, he traditionally taught, three primary spheres of calling, usually combining family and work into the same sphere and with the same purpose.
Who would have ever imagined that when Jesus makes this statement to Peter, that he would later be a coward the moment when Jesus, who he is confessing his faith in, would be hung on a cross.
Lee Jong-rak is a pastor in South Korea. In South Korea, every year, hundreds of babies are left for dead on the sides of streets. Pastor Lee had an overwhelming sense that he needed to do something to save these dying babies.
In the beginning of April, I released an abridged version of Luther’s Commentary on Galatians entitled Galatians: Selections from Martin Luther’s Commentary. The goal with this version of the commentary was simple, I wanted average, everyday people who would normally be intimidated by the work of Luther to have an easy way to dive into the work of Martin Luther.
Galatians is one of Luther’s most significant works and is foundational in understanding the distinction between Law and Gospel. In my original post, here’s how I described what I was attempting to do
The other night in the midst of our bedtime routine my son asked a simple, yet profound theological question. The question, "How does Jesus make Spiderman costumes?"
Bloody, bruised, and burnt out—our friends, family members, and coworkers are walking out of churches, giving up on God’s family, and at the same time giving up on the message that the Church has been entrusted with. This is the same old story that we’ve been hearing Christians sound alarms over for decades.
In the 1970s and 1980s, nearly every movie that was set in New York City begins with an establishing shot of a graffiti-covered subway. In an article and podcast episode that describes this and the New York Transit authorities attempts at cleaning up the subway.
Christian t-shirts, mediocre films about the rapture, and Christian music that is a copycat of the Top 40 are proof that Christians largely misunderstand the doctrine of vocation.
There’s a retired lab technician called EP, who in the book Moonwalking with Einstein, is referred to as “the most forgetful man in the world.” EP suffered from one of the most sever cases of amnesia ever documented.
The rise of Luther's revolutionary influence coincided with the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg.
Why was this revolutionary?
Freedom is not a word I would typically use to describe work. Even in good jobs, there is a weight and pressure that makes work much closer to slavery than freedom.