Over the past several years I’ve gotten in the December habit of compiling lists of my favorite music releases. While I was in seminary taking preaching classes, I sought out an exercise that would help me enjoy, evaluate, and communicate texts in a creative way to an audience. Since, at the time, all I was…
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More and more I am recognizing that my book on cynicism (see the icon in to the right) is ultimately a pastoral exercise in applying Christian eschatology to our daily reality. Cynicism arises from disillusionment. When the rug gets jerked form beneath our feet and we find ourselves breathless staring up at the ceiling, wondering…
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When I took a preaching class in seminary, I never expected it to be such a creative launching pad for me. We listened and watched all kinds of preaching and preachers and focused on different, and sometimes novel, ways of communicating both clearly and compellingly. I went on to take another course, with professor Chuck…
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When I took a preaching class in seminary, I never expected it to be such a creative launching pad for me. We listened and watched all kinds of preaching and preachers and focused on different, and sometimes novel, ways of communicating both clearly and compellingly. I went on to take another course, with professor Chuck…
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To just say Jonathan Green plays hymns is a bit deceptive. Posted up in Edinburgh, Scotland, this native Bostonian, weaves the stories of the past with the realities of the present, glancing towards the future. His “hymns” blend the ethereal thump and fuzz of his electronic equipment with the warm strums of obviously human instrumentation. …
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In Eugene Peterson’s memoir, The Pastor, he calls his activity as an author “heuristic writing.” That is, he writes to think, to sort, to wrestle… not necessarily to explain tidily or to make authoritarian decrees. “Heuristic writing” captures well what we are trying to do with this blog. Our writing is a discipline of straining…
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The namesake of this blog is taken from a phrase my wife supplied as she carefully read through drafts for Faith Without Illusions. Hopeful Realism is a perspective that holds rosy idealism and shallow optimism as incompatible in an ex-Eden world (hence, “Realism”). But the perspective is “hopeful” because it holds that cynicism is incompatible…
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This is the day that Evil gets festive press. Halloween caricatures Evil, dressing it up rather innocuously in ghostly face paint, plastic masks, fake fangs. This is the day when it is okay to play-act as the terrifying mythical entities that, as we rationally explain to our kids, do not actually haunt the closet space. …
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From the movie 2012; photo found at National Geographic I was in the minivan with my sister. The side door was propped open and my buddy Kevin was standing there looking up at the sky. His parents owned the little video store on main street where we had parked. My mom had gone inside to…
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