Category Archives: Kingdom Values

Daring Faith: The Holy Spirit

It was the first day of school for Dan Lear’s three kids. In a scramble to get his boys to class on time, the Seattle lawyer wound up parking in a space he probably should have avoided. “There was a … Continue reading

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Daring Faith: I Was Blind But Now I See

In 2013, I made a choice to believe in the resurrection. Two years earlier, my father-in-law, Alan Shates, was diagnosed with ALS, a disease for which there is no known cure. As we watched this disease slowly strip Alan of … Continue reading

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Hope Against Hope

Originally posted on already & not yet:
It was a Saturday. We were planning to go to Nashville that day to see her. She’d been hospitalized there for several days and we’d planned for me to finish up the school…

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Creation Care

Today our family drove through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. It’s our first visit to the park since the wildfires ravaged the area last fall, claiming the lives of more than a dozen people and causing property damage and … Continue reading

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Daring Faith: Believing is Seeing

Game 1 of the 1988 World Series pitted the Oakland A’s vs. the Los Angeles Dodgers. The A’s were heavy favorites to win the Series, having won 104 games in the regular season followed by a sweep of the Red … Continue reading

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Daring Faith: Christian Consumerism

In a recent study included in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, children were shown to overwhelmingly prefer the taste of food that comes in McDonald’s wrappers. In the study, preschool children sampled identical foods in packaging from McDonald’s and in … Continue reading

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Daring Faith: Born Again

In August of 2010, Judy Rivers of Logan, Alabama went to her local bank to open a new account. As the clerk input Rivers’ personal information, everything seemed to be going smoothly, but then the woman behind the desk stopped … Continue reading

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A Theological Reading of “In the Sanctuary of Outcasts”: Church

I just finished Neil White’s fantastic memoir In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. White spent 12 months — spring 1993 to spring 1994 — incarcerated at the minimum-security Federal Medical Center in Carville, Louisiana. What made this incarceration unique was the “convergence … Continue reading

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Best Books of 2016

Time for my annual list of best books I’ve read this year. (To access my previous “best books” lists, click here.) Each year I set out with a goal to read 52 books — one per week. Admittedly, that’s an … Continue reading

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Soong-Chan Rah on Identification and Lament

In his seminal work Prophetic Lament: A Call for Justice in Troubled Times, Soong-Chan Rah writes about Jeremiah’s identification with the people of Jerusalem in the book of Lamentations. While Lamentations 1&2 describe the destruction of Jerusalem from a fairly dispassionate … Continue reading

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