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Tilling the Soil
Those that have joined us for Bible Study can tell you one really important concept that comes out of our earliest creation story. It begins in Genesis 2 (chapter 1 was written later). GOD creates the earth and all of the creatures of the earth. Then from the soil (adama), the first human (adam) was…
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Abel Was a Creative
[NOTE: All scripture quotes are from The Schocken Bible by Everett Fox which transliterates the text to better represent the sound of the Hebrew. Below, Cain and Abel are Kayin and Hevel] While preparing a bible study on Genesis, I was given new insight about the traditional Cain and Abel story. It prophetically speaks to…
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God Is a Lousy Name
In seminary, my Hebrew professor explained the choice we have in dealing with describing GOD. To begin with, we traditionally don’t use GOD’s name in scripture. We use a marker. Wherever the name is used, it is replaced with GOD or LORD in caps. The name was first written in ancient Hebrew, which does not…
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The Great Storyteller
A few years ago, in the summer, I would scoop up my precocious three year-old and we would brave the Georgian heat to go for a walk. “Long walk or short walk,” I would ask. “Long walk,” she replied. As if there were any other kind to her. We would take off down the road.…
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Talking GOD: the Tony Jones Challenge
[Tony Jones recently challenged progressive theo-bloggers to talk about GOD. You can find the rules here and check out the follow-up post. The exercise has so far been fruitful for me, as I’ve written a couple of posts that will go up in the next few days about two aspects of GOD: GOD as the…
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Relearning How to Color
When I was young, I was always drawing. I would watch Commander Mark and draw along, making all sorts of pictures of spaceships and alien planets. I would make up my own comic book characters, sketch them out, write back stories, and imagine whole universes. I’ve always seen myself as creative. As someone who creatively…
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Experiential Teaching Is Not For the Weak
There is something about this story about a “fake kidnapping” that seems strangely wrong. Not in the idea of terrorizing youth or in the idea that we are an “overly judicious” society. There is something else. Toward the end, we get the defense: “It was a youth event, to illustrate what others have encountered on…
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A Pastor’s Response to General Convention #77
We aren’t the Rotary. We aren’t a country club. We aren’t civil society. We aren’t a local government. We aren’t a Lodge or an Order or anything like that. We are the church and the church is different. We forget that sometimes. And in many ways. When we get together to set up the…