About a year and a half ago, I “learned” from a Scott Adams book something I had long suspected: Human beings are not primarily rational and logical. We are mostly emotional. Once we really come to grips with this truth, I believe life makes more sense, even though it also means accepting the fact that the people around us (and we ourselves) are going to act and speak in unpredictable ways. (And that can be a bit scary!)  James K. A. Smith in You Are What You Love has come to this same conclusion, but I really like the way…

Today’s blog post is meant to do double duty – it will give me something to post here AND it will help me sort through aspects of a paper I have to write by Wednesday, comparing two books: You are What You Love by James K. A. Smith and For the Life of the World by Alexander Schmemann.   Smith’s book contends that humans are shaped by their pursuit of what they most love. And even though we believers say we love God, we are living in a culture which is caught up in the pursuit of material pleasures and entertainment. Our characters and spirits are shaped by our habits – holy habits (such…

Simplicity was at the heart of my most memorable and useful accountability group experience during my lifetime. I met weekly with two close friends, Tim and Jamie, during my days at Asbury Theological Seminary during the late 1990s.  More precisely, I should say that we met weekly as an accountability group, because outside that particular hour, we met daily and even hourly as friends. (Tim was my roommate and Jamie lived in the same dorm and the three of us regularly worked together in a youth ministry context.) When we gathered together for accountability, though, we spent the hour asking…

Today was the first meeting of a new small group for men that I have agreed to lead. It’s kind of a requirement for one of my classes, but my motivation is more about finding a couple of other guys locally who can work together to challenge each other to keep advancing in our faith.  So far there are just three of us and we are a very international group: our backgrounds are American, Haitian, and Nigerian. We plan to meet every Friday afternoon at 4:30. The church gave me the names of six men who have recently expressed an…

You know how Paul writes that incredible definition of “love” in 1 Corinthians 13? Love is patient. Love is kind.  And all that. Well, I wish he had done the same with the word “faith”. I am just not sure I completely understand the word as it is used throughout the Bible. Some people have no faith … and that makes sense. But some have “great faith” and some have “little faith”. Why is that not worded as “more faith” and “less faith”?  And as I am reading slowly through the book of Matthew, it seems like “understanding” is a…

A question popped into my head today: Does God have a personality? I think the answer is yes and I think it makes a difference to understand God as having a personality. Of course, his personality is mysteriously immense, multi-faceted, and composed of only good traits.  If we don’t consider God as having a personality, I think we’re in danger of missing out on his personhood altogether. We end up imagining some amorphous being who is quite one-dimensional. He might be the cosmic stick-in-the-mud. A distant cloud. The finger-wagging nag. Or the severely disappointed father.  On the positive side, we…

Were Jesus’s disciples just not very bright people?  I used to wonder at times, what with passages in the Gospels like Matthew 16:5-12 – When they crossed to the other side, the disciples forgot to take bread. “Watch out!” Jesus told them. “Beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and Sadducees.” They discussed this among themselves and concluded, “It is because we did not bring any bread.” Aware of their conversation, Jesus said, “You of little faith, why are you debating among yourselves about having no bread? Do you still not understand? Do you not remember the five loaves for…