a pastor in Austin
From the category archives:
In recent years, I’ve had the opportunity to develop friendships with three different men who were trying to navigate the tension between what it meant to be gay and Christian. Each was at a different place in his story when I first got befriended him, but each story had one thing in common…living between the [...]
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Through ViralBloggers.com I was given an opportunity to review Jesus, Interrupted by Bart Erhman. (I promise this blog isn’t going to be reduced to an outlet for book reviews even if it’s looked like that lately!)
For those unfamiliar with Ehrman, he has an interesting background. A former evangelical, he was educated at Moody, Wheaton, and [...]
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IVP has been kind enough to allow me to pick out some of their recent releases for review. I look forward to reading the books that caught my attention and sharing them with you here in the months to come. First up is a book called Deepest Differences: A Christian-Atheist Dialogue, by James Sire, and [...]
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It’s as if Rodney Stark wrote The Rise of Christianity with me in mind. The subject matter of Christianity, and the historical and analytical presentation style are all right up my alley. Through the perspective of a sociologist, Stark dug through the first 300 years of Christianity to see what it was that caused Christianity [...]
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Makoto Fujimura is a contemporary artist whose home and studio are near Ground Zero. Out of a response to the attacks on 9/11, he began to set aside time every Saturday to write. This was a time to process and reflect on the emotions and changes in his life and city. The result of these [...]
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I received a review copy of A New Kind of Conversation. The subtitle is Blogging Toward a Postmodern Faith. My first impression was that this was a book about blogging, and how this online conversation is helping shape postmodern faith. I thought it might be interesting. But on a closer look, I realized it [...]
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I’m not sure if I would have read On the Side of the Angels, by Joseph D’Souza and Benedict Rogers, if I hadn’t been sent a review copy. Heck…I hadn’t even heard of it. After reading it, I hope that neither of those statements will be true for others.
The subtitle is Justice, Human Rights and [...]
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After about six people had recommended it, I finally got around to reading TrueFaced. To be honest with you (that is what this book is about, after all), I bought the book two years ago, after about four different friends had recommended it. So it sat on my to-read shelf for two years. And since [...]
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I’ve worked through another small pile of books that I received as an Ooze Select Blogger. Publishers partner with the Ooze to send me free books, and I tell you what I think about them on my blog. Here are some titles I received throughout the fall that I’ve had a chance to work through:
Not [...]
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Maybe I somehow missed it, but I don’t recall hearing the same amount of buzz about A Thousand Splendid Suns as I did about Khalid Hosseini’s first book, The Kite Runner. That’s too bad…because it’s better.
This book represents everything about why I am serious about reading fiction. Hosseini does more than tell a story…evident in [...]
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It’s been over four years since I sat down with Jeff for a conversation that would mark me for the better.
Jeff had been in my high school ministry. Now, a few years out of high school, he was struggling with his church experiences. Jeff was always a writer, and he had written a book [...]
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The quote I just posted came from E. Stanley Jones’ reflections on a conversation he had with Gandhi (as recorded in The Christ of the Indian Road). Jones, who befriended Gandhi as a missionary in India, asked the great leader what would be required for Christianity to be “naturalized” in India. Gandhi had a four [...]
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This morning, Tim Keller’s apologetic work, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism came to my mind in one of those random and varied thought chains that I find myself in. Often.
You have those too, right?
Please tell me yes.
The next thought in the chain was alarm that I did not [...]
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The Christ of the Indian Road is an 80 year old text written by E. Stanley Jones, a Methodist missionary to India in the first half of the 20th Century. He describes the use of a phrase in dialogue with some Indian leaders that later became the title of this book:
I talked to them of [...]
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At the beginning of 2008, I made one resolution. I was going to read more stories. I always wanted to have at least one work of fiction or a biography/memoir going. Pat me on the back, because I was successful.
With every visit to an online or virtual bookstore, I am overwhelmed with all that I [...]
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