The Little Friar

In my most recent book , I explore the notion that I'm an evangelical universalist.  By that I mean that if you put a gun to my head and forced me to guess how I think it all (and I mean all ) will wrap up in the end (and I mean end ) I'd go with a form of Christian universalism. But when I tell people this they quickly assume I've got some feel-good, wishy-washy, don't worry be happy, mojo working.  I was reminded of this during a conversation with a friend the other day who basically made this same move on me by suggesting I was going light on sin.  But I'm not light on sin.  In fact, I'm harder on sin than he is.  This is what I said to him: "Wherever the wrath of God is burning against sin, there hell is."  Hell isn't a location.  It's not a destination.   Hell is about formation.  Transformation.   Think Paul's comments about "burning coals" in Romans 12 . Then it hit me.  The problem is with the label "un...

Erik Guzman's The Seed: A True Myth is part Brennan Manning, part C.S. Lewis.  This novel is nothing short of a spiritual journey into the personal worlds we create in order to protect ourselves and those we love from the pains of a broken world.  In Guzman's own way, he weaves a story that tells the grand biblical narrative of God's unconditional love and its redemptive work in that broken world. The Seed is a page-turning Christian fantasy.  I found myself drawn to Madeline and Roark's desperate flight from The Shadow that destroyed their home and is threatening their lives.  Tatus, an older man who has sworn to avenge the death of his family at the hands of The Shadow, becomes a companion whose promise to keep them safe is contingent upon they're building Tatus a fortress.  So Madeline and Roark build. In the process, though Madeline and Roark grow angry and fearful.  Because there's an unseen Evil out to destroy them. We've all had that feeling...

Thomas Nelson's Chronological Study Bible: Explore God's Word in Historical Order offers a roughly chronological order.  Granted, it helps to keep in mind the editors' own words: Rearranging the Bible is, of course, a fallible human effort.  Even those who have earned advanced degrees in the various fields of biblical studies would disagree on any particular rearrangement.  The editors of The Chronological Study Bible have been forced at times to make hard decisions, to choose one location at the neglect of another that is equally plausible.  In such instances, an honest effort has been made to acknowledge another possible arrangement and to present its case fairly.  This allows readers to decide the issues for themselves (page ix). That's because I'm not entirely sure that scholars -- even those with really strong reasons -- might ever agree with which texts are ordered chronologically.  For example, I wondered what the editors might do with ...

Julie Fenster's Jefferson's America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers who Transformed a Nation tells the story -- the wonderful and twisted story -- of how Napoleon's France acquired the territory from Spain and then sold it a year later to America, while Spain did their best to block exploration by Jefferson's men -- far more than just Lewis and Clark.  The threat of war with Spain was a constant, with explorers on alert of the potential dangers. Thomas Jefferson sought men who would make a geographic record, interact and seek peace with Native Americans, and survey sites for forts.  Most importantly, they were to conduct experiments to establish longitude and latitude, describe the land, and collect mineral, vegetable, and animal specimens. "Jefferson had in mind a very special combination of characteristics when he chose his explorers," writes Fenster.  Andrew Ellicott and Thomas Freeman were appointed to survey the 31st parallel bounda...

Tonight, I've had opportunity to pray and think -- amidst getting the laundry out of the way and writing for some homework. I was brought to mind -- as I often am in my praying -- to the Psalms.  Particularly, Psalm 131. Psalm 131 has always made me uncomfortable.  Because I'm one of those Christians for whom my faith flows out of my thinking, I push back against the mysteries of faith. Truth be told, I'm never comfortable with mysteries.  When I have questions, I want answers. Consequently, some might argue that, theologically, I push too hard.  So hard that I end up holding to some answers and ideas that are theologically suspect.  Perhaps a quicker embrace of mystery would have been able to preserve my orthodoxy. That seems to me to be the recommendation of Psalm 131: My heart is not proud, Lord, my eyes are not haughty; I do not concern myself with great matters or things too wonderful for me. But I have calmed and quieted myself, I am li...

Well, American Christians are at it again.  They're protesting another store (this time, Target) for perceived social corruption that finds them either cavorting with the Enemy or standing resolute against the powers of evil that destroy our political and social fabric.  Yesterday, some 500,000 folks decided to target Target for protests, because Target his begun recognizing restrooms that don't follow a binary gender categorization. How far we've come from Jesus' own imagination about political and social power. Early in his ministry, before he'd even preached his first sermon, Jesus was confronted by Satan, who made Jesus an offer few of us would apparently refuse: Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world.  And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I will give it to anyone I please.  If you, then, will worship me, it will all be you...

Craig Greenfield's Subversive Jesus:  An Adventure in Justice, Mercy, & Faithfulness in a Broken World is a clarion call for the Church to recover its vocation in living with and ministry for and with the poor, the drug addicts.  It's a challenge to be serious with living out Jesus' ministry and message.  From living in the slums of Pnom Penh, Cambodia, to the slums of Vancouver, Canada, Greenfield believes strongly in literally living out the radical message of Jesus -- of loving his neighbors, of feeding the hungry, and of treating the poor like people. Subversive Jesus is partly an biographical tale in which Greenfield chronicles his family's move from Cambodia to Vancouver.  But Greenfield continually points out that one needn't go around the world to find "the poor".  They're our neighbors in our cities, too. But it's a tale told without condemnation.  Instead, Greenfield writes with the same grace he extends toward all whom he mee...

I'm really good at making book recommendations.  So, after a friend asked what philosophy books I thought every person should read, I decided to take up the challenge. The problem of course, my introductory philosophy book notwithstanding, I think the line between what is "philosophy" and what is "theology" is fairly well blurred.  So if some of these choices seem rather arbitrary or without merit, just know that a theologian is making them.  Feel free to dismiss as you're inclined. First, I decided to leave off the list all the classics -- Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas and the scores of modern thinkers.  Not because they're rubbish, but because anyone making a request like this one, really should already have been reading them. These books are really in no particular order, so don't think that just because a book comes toward the end of my list, that it's less important.  In all honesty, I simply wrote as I was led to write.  That s...

Todd Wynward's Rewilding the Way:  Break Free to Follow an Untamed God is a richly woven theological tapestry of the relationship between Christian faith and a vital environmentalism. Wynward doesn't wary of tackling some big themes that pervade in our culture -- things like over-consumption, climate change and affluenza.  But that exploration doesn't begin from a moralistic perspective; instead, what we have here is a beautiful theological vision.  Rewilding the Way asks some important questions:  "What does it mean for Christians to live in this world, but not of this world?"  "Where is Jesus leading us -- particularly into the untamed parts of the world we might not otherwise engage?"  "How do we Christians negotiate our responsibilities of family and work as Christians ?"  Drawing from his own wilderness experience, Wynward advocates a return to the wild.  He asks his readers to go cimarron, "a Spanish term for a slave or domest...

Ron Fournier's Love That Boy:  What Two Presidents, Eight Road Trips, and My Son Taught Me about a Parent's Expectations is a memoir written for every father to read.  In it, Fournier recounts the story of learning to connect with his youngest child, Tyler.  That connection, though, wasn't easy:  Tyler hated sports, which his dad loved, and he was socially awkward, which made Fournier cringe.  That's because Tyler was diagnosed -- at the rather late age of 12 -- with Asperger's Syndrome. One thread of the memoir follows father and son on a series of post-diagnosis road trips.  Tyler loves history and Fournier is a former White House correspondent, so they visit presidential house-museums -- the White House; Teddy Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill; the Adams home in Quincy; Jefferson's Monticello.  Fournier tries to connect the dots for Tyler:  Roosevelt suffered asthma and was bullied as a child but grew up to be wildly popular, he tells him....

Success – who doesn’t want it? In leaders, the desire to succeed seems to be nothing less than hard-wired. Of course, some success brings with it unwanted complications – increasing busyness, for example – but by and large, the choice between succeeding and failing is not one that leaders have to think hard about.   St Paul, for example, saw setback after setback but was indomitable in his quest to put Christian roots down throughout the Mediterranean world: “I press on,” he once said, “to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me” (Philippians 3.12).   Part of Paul’s drive to succeed in his mission was his personality.   But a more significant aspect of his resolve was his faith in God’s ability to bring life from the dead.   He learned this from thinking through the basic dynamic of Jesus’ own life:   For Jesus, success was resurrection by God from his death. Such a view of success is not easily translatable into a formula for Christi...

Drema Berkheimer's Running on Red Dog Road:  And Other Perils of an Appalachian Childhood is an inviting memoir filled with a grandmother's tales for her grandchildren -- and in that way, displays the two most important practices that sustain Appalachia:  Storytelling and families. Berkheimer grew up during World War II.  Her father died in a coal-mining accident shortly after her birth, and her mother worked in a plane factory in New York.  Her Pentecostal grandparents raised her as they planted churches in the hollows of West Virginia.  Like so many others of that era and that place, Berkheimer's family survived the Great Depression through thrift and ingenuity.  She paints a vivid word picture:  Chickens run through the yard with their heads cut off.  An uncle digs through the dump for paint cans.  Grandma sews towels and pedal pushers out of feed sacks. But that colorful depth is nothing without the Appalachian culture that ...

Byron Paulus & Bill Elliff's OneCry:  A Nationwide Call for Spiritual Awakening was a thoroughly disappointing book that calls for a national revival. I say this book was disappointing for a number of reasons. First, OneCry is based on a myopic reading the biblical narrative.  The basic premise, repeated several times and in different ways, is that the US is in grave spiritual and moral decline and crisis -- as focused by what is referred to early in the discussion as the "three great spiritual diseases" of abortion, divorce and pornography.  Nowhere in the entire narrative do the authors refer to the much more generic ills of greed, injustice and the tendencies towards warfare and environmental destruction which are the real drivers of that "decay and decline" in our society which they decry.  While pushing so many hot-button cultural issues, they miss the larger biblical narrative's thrust against the the diseases that often cripple nations. ...

Marcus Warner and Jim Wilder's Rare Leadership:  4 Uncommon Habits for Increasing Trust, Joy, and Engagement in the People You Lead is another book on leadership that turned out to be a pleasant surprise.  Warner and Wilder avoids all the superficial layers of activities, techniques and strategies, in favor the habits that make for genuine Christian leadership:  (1) Return to the joy of Christian community; (2) Act as our Christian selves; (3) Remain relational; and (4) Endure hardship. Rare Leadership is less about a particularly unique ("rare") type of leadership.  It's more about the acronym that describes those four habits. One of the most intriguing things about Rare Leadership is the generous amount of models readers will find.  Warner and Wilder have drawn upon their own experience in Christian leadership -- rare people who have learnt to lead from a depth spirituality than from the typical axioms of leadership literature. But perhaps the most i...

The God Who Heals:  Words of Hope for a Time of Sickness is a collection of sixty short meditations on biblical texts that pertain to the Church ministry of healing.  Written by Johann Blumhardt -- most known for his ministry of healing and exorcism in the late nineteenth century -- and his son, Christoph Blumhardt -- who was a significant influence upon Barth and Bonhoeffer -- these meditations offer guided reflections on the nature of that healing ministry and the vocation of God for all creation's well-being. As someone who has faced down cancer and it treatment twice in my life, The God Who Heals is a book for which I've longed for a long time.  It's meditations are built upon a central theme:  Faith and trust in the will of God made known in Jesus Christ.  Both pastors and theologians, these authors point away from our own suffering and toward the wise Creator who brings healing out of pain, life out of death.  While modern medicine may promise ...

Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. 1 John 4 is foundational to my vision of the Christian faith . What I find remarkable about this famous text is how knowledge of God is associated with love .  The one who loves knows God. And whoever does not love does not know God. Love is our epistemology. Phrased another way, theology is affectional rather than intellectual.

Dave Willis' The Seven Laws of Love:  Essential Principles for Building Stronger Relationships is essential reading for anyone, not just couples, who desires to develop holy relationships that nurture the love Christians have been called to exhibit. The Seven Laws of Love highlights all of the ways in which we Christians are called to live into relationships that reflect the Kingdom:  In how we love God, ourselves, our families, and even our enemies.  It's an enjoyable read, and one that you find you can't put down.  I read it in one afternoon. That's because The Seven Laws of Love begins by laying out a Gospel vision for how Christians are called to demonstrate love -- through our commitment, our sacrifices, our truthfulness, our fearlessness, our gracefulness, and our healing.  Such love is a vocation for the rest of our lives with God, too. Christian love is not love without action, though, so Willis then explores all of the ways in which we live o...

John 18.10-11 will inevitably make people like me -- that is, Christian pacifists -- face a question that gets asked:  What are we to do with "put your sword away" in a world where groups like ISIS exist.  Are we, or is a nation like the US, to put the sword away when people are being beheaded, woman raped and girls taken as sex slaves? I don't have answers to those questions.  Because I think any answer I give to those questions will avoid the conversation that Christian pacifists have to have when we talk about violence. We are -- all of us are, whether Christian, pacifist, or none of the above -- people who live within history and we have to appreciate the tragic nature of history. If, for example, we bomb ISIS that's not something to cheer about.  It's horribly tragic.  Plus, that bombing will simply create more violence as those affected by the bombing will most likely become radicalized and come to hate the US.  Bombing, even if you think i...

I started reading Pope Francis' Amoris Laetitia ("On the Joy of Love") last night.  I had been looking forward to this new "apostolic exhortation" for some time.  And for the most part I really enjoy it. It's exceptionally long, as apostolic exhortations go -- over 250 pages.  I haven't finished it, since it's taking longer to read, in its digital format, but I've read enough of it thus far to have a general feel for the document as a whole.  And much of the material contained here simply reissues material that I've read from Pope Francis in other contexts after the Synod of the Family stuff was published.  So as a whole, I'm fairly disappointed in that length.  It's rather laborious.  I'm not sure why the Holy See simply didn't refer to that material in footnotes.  I wish they hadn't reproduced it whole-cloth here.  I'm afraid the length will turn off so many readers.  That's sad, given that the fresh stuff I...

I've grown increasingly ill as the day has worn on. Now it's midnight and here I am, shaking with fever, and dizzy, not with delight. This stomach bug stinks, much like the bowl which now cools my warm forehead. It's really quite unreal, how ill that I feel. I would say I think I might die, but death would be a welcome detour -- and as stinky as this bug seems to be delight is not its nature. The gist of this poem -- at midnight from the lavatory -- no, I'm not alright. This stomach bug stinks.

John Elder Robinson's Be Different:  My Adventures with Asperger's and My Advice for Fellow Aspergians, Misfits, Families, and Teachers picks up where his 2007 memoir, Look Me In the Eye:  My Life with Asperger's , left off -- with wit and wisdom for other Aspies.  The memoir was an eye-opening book for me.  Look Me In the Eye spoke of a man grew up never fully understanding why he, an intelligent, capable person, could never quite fit in.  It was only when he was diagnosed with Asperger's at age 40 that he realized his quirkiness arose from having been born with a mind that made connections in ways different from what he calls "nypicals" -- people with neurotypical or "normal" brains.  Unlike so many other Aspies who end up alienated, alone and unemployed, Robison gradually found ways to overcome his social and communication deficits and transform his differences -- such as superior concentration, abstract reasoning and mechanical skill...

Rice Brooks' Man, Myth, Messiah:  Answering History's Greatest Question explores potential answers to the question at the heart of Matthew's biblical story about Jesus:  "Who do you say I am?" "The goal of this book", Brooks writes, "is to build confidence in the reader that Jesus Christ was not only a real person but that He was the promised Messiah (Savior) and the Son of God".  To achieve that goal, though, requires Brooks to look at far more than what Scripture itself claims about Jesus.  So he turns to themes that go into underwriting Scripture's claims about Jesus:  The historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, the trustworthiness of the New Testament witnesses to him, the falseness of comparisons of Jesus to mythical figures, and the reality of miracles. Man, Myth, Messiah is meant to be an introductory text, so readers who are hoping for in-depth analysis will be disappointed.  But in a clear, coherent way, Brooks sets out all t...

Dustin Willis' Life in Community:  Joining Together to Display the Gospel is a little book that packs a big punch for the contemporary Church. When people live in community moved by the Gospel and marked by the gift of the Spirit, great things happen.  They commit to one another.  They grieve together, sing together, eat, pray, and play together.  They love, serve, honor, encourage, and provide for each other gladly.  And they live on mission together.  Hearts are healed, walls come down, and outsiders come in.  No competition.  No pretense.  No vain conceit.  Just full hearts breaking bread and giving freely. That's the image of the Church that Willis is able to share with us in Life in Community .  It's an amazing study for those of us who find ourselves living in the shadow of what God has destined for the world for us in Christ's Body.  Reclaiming Scripture's stunning vision of Gospel-centered community, Life in...

Manny Mill's Radical Prayer:  The Power of Being Bold and Persistent is a powerful little book.  It moves attention from prayer-as-getting-what-we-ask-for to prayer-as-communication-with-God.  Mill's focus on nearly every page is on God.  He takes attention away from us, from our selves and our desires, and puts that attention where prayer rightly belongs -- on the Divine, on our longing for the Divine, and how that desiring is answered in "radical prayer". For Mill, prayer is fundamentally a fulfillment of "the Great Commandment and, in doing so, equips and unleashes individual believers like you and me to slavishly know and serve God as His loving witnesses to this lost world".  He moves from prayerless pastors to developing a relationship with God, a relationship in which we are cherished by that which we cherish. And Mill rightly insists that it's only in learning the language of Scripture -- in those words bubbling up in and through us to bec...