“Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil!” — Last week’s Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v Wade has caused a lot of turmoil. Those who require abortions or who may need them in the future are grieving, while those who have clamored for abortion bans have cheered the decision. For decades the gap between people who are…

Institutional Problems Plague the US Church — Those who are paying attention to big news in the world of Major US denominations (and honestly, who isn’t?) may be tracking a few big stories that are currently developing. These stories have very little to do with one another, but taken together, they signal the potential of a major…

Between COVID and Gun Violence, a Society that Runs on Blood — Not long ago I looked at the rising death toll from COVID and the economic calculus used to justify inaction. From those observations, I argued that we, as a society, practice a kind of human sacrifice. …

Diving into a Hairy bit of Religious Discourse — Before I begin, I know that some will jump right to the comments to say “The Bible should have no place in determining our laws. If that’s your view, then congratulations, I agree with you! The issue that remains is that aside from those who want to use the Bible…

Or, How to Make Your Bookshelf Look Like You Went to Seminary — I’ve got a pretty intense couple of weeks at work ahead of me, so I wanted to take it easy. At the same time, I don’t want to leave my readers hanging, so this week I wanted to discuss some of my favorite books I was assigned in Seminary. I’ve…

Digging in to a Common Idea about how Religions Interact — Every year, especially around Easter and Christmas, a wide variety of memes, social media posts, and cheeky discussions at holiday gatherings assert one simple fact over and over: that Christmas and Easter, the two most important Christian holidays, are not really Christian at all, but repackaged Pagan holidays. These claims…

More than just Samson. A lot more. — I’ve written about the Deuteronomic Histories before. These are a run of books that begin with Deuteronomy and culminate in First and Second Kings. In between these books ends you’ll find Joshua, Judges, and First and Second Samuel. You may also find Ruth, but that’s not part of the Deuteronomic…

In which an entire culture struggles with what to do when things go really, really bad. — I had an interesting conversation just before staff meeting a couple of weeks ago with one of my co-workers. We were talking about the way the pandemic has cycled, and I made a comment about how maybe we could open up “in a few months, when things have calmed down.”…

We May Not Be Chopping Off Heads on Pyramids Anymore, But What Are We Doing? — I reading a book about East Asian Archaeology last year, when an odd detail stuck out to me. In many of the monumental buildings that have been excavated from the Neolithic and Bronze Ages sites in China, we find the corpses of people in the foundations. Now, we know that…