belief
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Immediately
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7 min read
Mark’s gospel uses the word “immediately” a lot. But what if it isn’t literal or a figure of speech? What if the evangelist is getting us to see beyond our reality–to where the kin-dom already is? How the immediacy of Jesus reveals the presence of the kin-dom Epiphany 4B | Mark 1:21-28 Time travel. It’s…
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Belief Is More Than What You Think
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7 min read
16. The unembodied faith of the mind is a prison, ensnaring the souls of all people, even God! Faith is not the contents of your mind. Despite what many of the faithful demand of each other. Or what the faithless think we believe. Belief isn’t a set of words or rational arguments. Faith isn’t a statement…
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You’ve heard the narratives about “what all Christians believe.” And you’ve heard many a high-profile pastor speak for all of Christians. He tells you precisely what we all believe, like we’re 3 billion cultists in the world with an identical worldview. We don’t all believe the same stuff. And yet this view of a singular…
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Bernie Sanders doesn’t care what you believe about hell. He does care if your beliefs demonize other people. This is the context in which Christian conservatives fell back to seeing persecutions everywhere. Often looking for persecutions precisely when asked to recognize their bias. At a recent confirmation hearing for Russell Vought who was nominated to become…
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Sight and Belief
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6 min read
When we look at the same picture, do our brains assess the contents of the picture differently? The short answer is yes. But how interesting is the short answer? Especially when the science had essentially been saying no. Easter 2A | John 20:19-31 Dr. Richard Nisbett, a psychologist from the University of Michigan has for…
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Just do the right thing.
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4 min read
If we whittle down our faith, we are left with two base ideas: what we believe and what we do. There is nothing more traditional in Christian faith than arguing over which one is better. Betting on God. Blaise Pascal made my favorite case for belief. Unlike most apologetics, which argue the case for God’s…