The Universe Demands a Cross: This post by Samuel James is brilliant and moving. Please read it. Here is a taste, “The sterilized metaphysics of Western spirituality, the liturgies of eat-pray-love, are sieves when it comes to the bloodiness of reality. I could, if I chose, close my eyes and insist on believing in the inherent goodness of man, the brotherhood of all, and the common destiny of all but the worst people. But I could not close my eyes hard enough to un-see the blood of vaginal delivery. The blood does not merely sit there. It calls out, just as the blood of Abel cried “out from the ground.” It calls out for reckoning.”
200 People Left Our Small Church: my friend Benjamin Vrbicek asks, “How does a pastor keep his heart from growing cynical when, over 350 weeks of pastoring the same church, I have lost an average of one person each week? And why are these congregants leaving our church anyway? What role might I play, even unintentionally, in sending sheep to what they perceive to be greener pastures?”
An Open Letter to Death: Cindy Matson begins, “Dear Death, I’m writing to you today with a simple message: Stop boasting. I realize that you have some reason for pride. You have had your way with nearly every human to ever live. (Do Enoch and Elijah keep you up at night?)”
True Humanism: Jesus, Marx, or Jenner? Bruce Ashford considers the options to Christianity in contemporary culture, “[T]hese thought leaders often pose as anthropologists who find Christianity dehumanizing and as tea-leaf readers who discern in the anfractuosities of history a movement toward a more “humanized,” Christ-less future.”
Tom Brady in Retirement: Football fans out there will enjoy this.