parables of a prodigal world

The Mozambican Civil War began in 1975 as people eventually concluded that decades of exploitation, oppression and neglect by Portugal's colonial expansion was the cause of their misery. Over 900,000 died in fighting and from starvation, five million civilians were displaced, many were made amputees by landmines, a legacy from the war that continues to plague Mozambique. After the war ended, in 1995, Bishop Dom Dinis Sengulane set up a project called Transforming Arms into Tools (TAE). During the civil war, millions of guns and other weapons poured into the country (there are no weapons manufacturers in Mozambique) and most of them remain hidden or buried in the bush. The project was an attempt to eliminate the threat presented by the hidden weapons. Mozambicans were encouraged to hand them over in exchange for items like plows, bicycles and sewing machines. In one case a whole village gave up its weapons in exchange for a tractor. Four Mozambican artists, Cristovao Canhavato, Hila...

I was thinking long and hard last night about the story that would best embody the theme of this Blog. I have so many floating around in my head. It occurred to me, though, that the inaugural story might be one that I've already told, one that was an integral step on the road that led me to write Parables of a Prodigal Son. It was a story that I submitted to the local newspaper last year. Never having done something like that before, I was pretty sure that nothing would come of it. It turned out, to my honest surprise, that the editor loved it and immediately dubbed me a "Guest Columnist." Click here to read the article. Happy Thanksgiving.

In my soon to be released book, Parables of a Prodigal Son: The Theologically Grounded Testimony of an Ordinary Scoundrel , I strive to provide my testimony through the matrix of a proper understanding of the historiocal Christian faith, an understanding gleaned primarily from the scholarship of N.T. Wright. This Weblog will attempt to carry forward the conversation that began in Parables of a Prodigal Son, limited not only to my own life stories but to the stories that are now being played out in the world around us. As in Parables , I will discuss these stories in an effort to make sense from within a historically biblical worldview, a worldview that takes into account the existence of a God that created the universe, who transcends and yet is at all times in loving interaction with it. I will strive to carry forward the conversation in a manner that takes into account the historical fact that a young peasant Jew named Yeshua, executed in first-century Palestine by the Roman authorit...