Leadingchurch.com

http://theweek.com/articles/671974/tvs-callous-neglect-workingclass-america

Stuff in the Basement

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2017/02/15/soul-evangelicalism-will-become-us/

One of the things that pushed CS Lewis over the edge between Christianity and Hinduism when he was moving from Theism to Faith was what I call scalability. Many religions are two speed. The villagers are monkeying around with idols and paying off the gods while the monks are practicing self-denial. Lewis notes that real things, like apples and chocolates are not like that. https://paulvanderklay.me/2017/02/15/christianity-scales/

The Bible is a very difficult book. Really smart people like Al Wolters and NT Wright spend all of their lives studying it and never even are able to cover all that humanity has discovered. Many other really smart people study it and get it horribly wrong. If you don’t believe me I’ve got a good number of books and commentaries to show you.

We might imagine that uneducated people living without access or ability to delve into the 2000 year conversation have no hope of finding profit in it. Such an assumption is refuted regularly in the darkest, hardest places of the world where ordinary, every day Christians lovingly devote themselves to it and are changed by it in dramatic ways.

Now you might note that many of these people get a lot wrong in their reading of scripture, but don’t the scholars do that too?

The miracle isn’t found in that the scholars find profit even though many don’t, it is in that the simple do.

Luke 12:32 (NIV)

³² “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.

http://everydayfeminism.com/2017/02/what-it-means-to-be-multigender/

http://religionnews.com/2017/02/14/this-womans-abortion-story-will-challenge-your-beliefs-no-matter-what-they-are/

Three years later, my ex had a baby with someone else and named her the same name I had mentioned for the baby that we didn’t have. I felt like I’d been struck by lightning, but it wasn’t acceptable to be pro-choice and feel devastated and wonder whether I’d made the right choice after all. It took three more years for the pain to motivate me to search for another way. I created a roadmap to recover my true experience and the possibility of a new life.

I made up the idea that this spirit-baby might not forgive me, as if it were sitting in therapy sessions in the afterlife, talking about how I’d screwed it up. Once I realized this nonphysical entity wasn’t blaming me for the way I’d handled three nightmarish weeks in 2004, I felt that it had compassion for me–or maybe I finally had compassion for myself.

How Should One Resist the Trump Administration? https://nyti.ms/2leMESH

http://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2016/12/2/13818796/remarkable-giant-e-ink-tablet-paper-notebook