Drew Downs

Make a New Normal

Faith

The search for meaning, purpose, and relationship. Our need for love compels us to seek it out, and when we find it, share it.

  • 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…

  • 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.…

  • [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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  •   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…