Our good friend Neil Gaiman recently pointed out, “Behind every Chesterton sentence there is someone painting with words, and it seems to me that at the end of any particularly good sentence or any perfectly-put paradox, you can hear the author, somewhere behind the scenes, giggling with delight.” Neil’s observation prompted me to explore anew […]
Today, during my morning meeting with The Boss, He mentioned Egypt. At first He said some inauspicious stuff like, “I have mingled within Egypt a spirit of confusion. Egypt’s princes are utterly foolish; and the wisest counselors of Pharaoh give stupid counsel. Egypt’s ‘wise men’ will make Egypt stagger in all its deeds, as a […]
PROTECTING SELF As they were coming home, when David returned from striking down the Philistine, the women came out of all the cities of Israel, singing and dancing, to meet King Saul, with tambourines, with songs of joy, and with musical instruments.And the women sang to one another as they celebrated, “Saul has struck down […]
I’m reading through 1 & 2 Chronicles these days, and concomitantly I found myself listening to an audiobook entitled “The Last Godfather: The Rise and Fall of Joey Massino” by Simon Crittle. And I realized something… This macabre book about the mafia is thoroughly helping me understand the dynamics, and emphatic ghastliness, displayed by God […]
A friend of mine recently reminded me of a paragraph from a past blog post. The paragraph reads: Jesus hates it when we attempt to have Him on our terms. Jesus will not tolerate our agenda to reduce Him to anything less than our Maker and Master. Jesus withdraws because we want to neuter and […]
The book of Judges reads like a series of bizarre dreams. The array of unusual stories is unparalleled. It is a saga of completely off-the-wall, utterly unexpected and shocking events. And the deeper you go into the narrative the more you realize that this dream is actually a nightmare. You come to find that the […]
I was riding my mountain bike this morning at Sherman Branch crying. Was I crying because I love being on the trail? My love of trails is definitely tear-worthy, but that’s not why I was crying. Was I crying because I fell off my bike? Not this time. …I was crying because I was listening […]
Let’s think about the motion picture Nacho Libre. The film is loosely based on the story of Fray Tormenta (“Friar Storm”, a.k.a. Rev. Sergio Gutiérrez Benítez), a real-life Mexican Catholic priest who had a 23-year career as a masked luchador and competed in order to support the orphanage he directed. There are a few things […]
I briskly traversed through the Gospel of Mark this morning. I normally progress ploddingly through the Γέγραπται, but sometimes it’s helpful to conduct a sprightly trot through a gospel in order to obtain a better sense of the surplus and sundry instances of Jesus offending people. It is absolutely vital that we come to grips […]