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O Love, I set out to write a systematic theology; I was going to explain what I believe about you, and while this little Lenten project started with me just wondering, after spending so much time just focused on trying to grow closer to you, what I actually believed about you, that project of inquiry…
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Let’s take the hardest question first, because it may be the most illustrative of what such a shift of central images can mean. What do we make of evil? Bad things happen to good people. That is, at it’s heart, unjust. If God is all-just and all-powerful, this is an insoluble problem. Either God is…
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I really wasn’t looking to start this by arguing with the central prayer of Christianity, the one given us by Jesus through the Gospels. But just this week it was pointed out to me that the Lord’s Prayer begins like this: Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy…
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Any attempt to articulate a system of theology faces a challenge from the start. What can we know about God, really? How can we be sure what we think to be true about God really is so? Philosophers get lost in this kind of question, because you can unravel the threads of knowledge for days.…
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We have God disastrously wrong. We focus a lot on God being powerful, and when tragedy happens, we wonder why he didn’t intervene or assume he caused the tragedy on purpose. So we see God as fickle and heartless. We focus a lot on God being just and righteous, and when the unthinkable happens we…
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I am not a professional. Why on earth would someone who isn’t a professional theologian, an academic, a priest, or a writer, with no real training in systematic theology, take on the task of trying to outline something like a systematic theology of love and renewal? And why would anyone read it? I have begun…
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I ought not be here. As I contemplate 50, the first birthday I will celebrate without a living parent, the same thought recurs that has struck me on most birthdays of my adult life, but maybe with a little extra poignancy. I ought not be here. I can’t speak for others, but for me, being…
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”Deaths of despair” have been in the news a lot the last couple of years, and especially with the recent announcement that US life expectancy has gone down for the third year in a row, attributed to drug addiction and suicide. Let me take a minute to lay out that, to the extent that these…
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When it grew late, his disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now very late; send them away so that they may go into the surrounding country and villages and buy something for themselves to eat.” But he answered them, “You give them something to eat.” They…
