word | spirit | world | church
Evangelicals love magic. On the face of it that doesn’t sound like a true statement, perhaps you remember the mild panic over Harry Potter in the early 2000s, or the much bigger panic over Dungeons and Dragons in the eighties—witchcraft remains something we are inherently nervous about, sometimes leading to absurd extremes. Which is true… Continue reading When Christians Love Magic
And stop trying to fix each other. Friends, you are not a machine. You are a beautiful, complex, confusing mess of a creature. This matters, because we talk about ourselves as though we are machines, and language creates the categories that our thought then fills. When we speak of ourselves as machines we start to… Continue reading Don’t Fix Me
There’s a trope where we see pictures from a concert or a festival or some other notable event and no one in the crowd is watching. Instead, they’re looking at their phones. Of course, they’re taking pictures or videoing the event for posterity or to share with their friends later. It’s not that they’re not… Continue reading Uncapturable
The last year has upended our lives, to say the least. Most of my friends have been reflecting on how it has upended our emotions as well. Have you noticed that? There’s a generalised malaise in the air. Sure, there’s ambient anxiety caused by the way we consume news like there has been for decades,… Continue reading Naming the Hydra
For you know how, like a father with his children, we exhorted each one of you and encouraged you and charged you to walk in a manner worthy of God, who calls you into his own kingdom and glory.1 Thessalonians 2:11–12 I am not a man naturally given to encouragement. If you were being polite… Continue reading On Encouragement
“When I caught Gerald in ‘68 he was completely wild.” “Wild? I was absolutely livid!” There’s a cliché that abounds in evangelical spaces that you can’t “put God in a box”. Well, no. If we’re feeling particularly clever with ourselves, we might then quip that “someone tried that, it didn’t end well.” Quite. I haven’t… Continue reading The wildness of God
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