A few weeks ago I finished listening to Stuart Diamond’s Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World. It had lots of great ideas to help one not only negotiate, but generally do well in the area of human relations. The major ideas were: Define your goal and make it […]
Last month, I listened to Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators. I became interested in the book by hearing about the “Shirky Principle,” particularly as it relates to the church on Tony Jones’ blog. The Shirky Principle basically states that institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are […]
I’ve been reading through Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic. In Letter XLI, Seneca says: God is near you, is with you, is inside you. Jesus also speaks of this notion of God being inside of you on multiple occasions: The kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:21b Jesus answered, ‘Is it not written in […]
I recently had a chance to be a part of putting together a theological and biblical critique of HB 56, which is a tough anti-immigration bill already passed into law by the Alabama legislature and signed by the governor. The opening pages of the bill list the intentions of the bill followed by a bunch […]
At the North Alabama Annual Conference of the UMC, I recently heard Brian McLaren make the argument that the church is in a similar predicament to the United States Postal Service. With the decline of letters and rise of email and digital media plus huge overhead, the postal service has run large deficits and has, […]
Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream, David Platt I listened to the audio version of this book and initially resonated with its intense call to authentic discipleship. It is a modern, evangelical Christian’s version of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic Cost of Discipleship. I loved much of what Platt said about the contrasts between […]