parables of a prodigal world

My friend Trevin Wax over at Kingdom People recently posted on the issue of abortion in "honor" of January being the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. My own account with the issue within my Christian life was shaped quite powerfully by a particular event, one which I chronicled in the closing paragraphs of the introduction of my (hopefully) soon-to-be-published book Parables of a Prodigal Son: The Theologically Grounded Testimony of an Ordinary Scoundrel . The story is set within the context of my grappling with the struggle to understand the bible as a holistic story, and my coming to understand that we can only grasp the truth of the Bible by understanding it as such. It goes something like this: In other words, the truth of the Bible can only be grasped by this holistic, bird’s-eye, narrative view. This narrative perspective is critical because our language is too limited, our experiences too varied, and our God too magnificent to be reduced to a set of objectively true state...

Given the strange sense of nausea I felt by giving Ann Coulter, and her divisiveness, airtime on my post yesterday, I was gripped by a calling to balance out my actions with a story of unity, one that truly reflects what true Christians hope, not for the perfecting of any other by their acceptance of certain dogmas, but for the coming together of all things under heaven and earth in Christ, that is, under the banner of the Kingdom which He announced and inaugurated. And with that in mind, enjoy the following symbol of that hope: Hodgepodge of Jews, Muslims and Christians cross the Sahara for peace . By Associated Press March 20, 2006 In this photo released Sunday, March 18, 2006 by the group Breaking the Ice, members of the group ride camels as they trek in the Eastern Sahara desert in Egypt. (AP) Ex-Israeli fighter pilot Gil Fogiel reads an English copy of the Quran. (AP) Ex-Israeli fighter pilot Gil Fogiel rarely talked about being a prisoner of war in Syria, until he sat across a ca...

As many of you know well by now, Ann Coulter touched off another heated and polarized/polarizing debate a few days back when she said that Jews need to be perfected by becoming Christian . I'm not one to give Coulter's words/thoughts much credence, much less to assess them at a rationalistic level, to say nothing of theology. But sometimes the most ridiculous comments can, at least, frame the parameters of a discussion even if they add nothing of substance to that discussion. And the question that struck me when I heard about Coulter's comment was "Do we, as Christians, perhaps need to examine the issue the other way around?" In other words, would most modern Christians benefit, be more "perfected," by becoming more Jewish? In other words, more like Jesus of Nazareth, son of Joseph, the first century Jew, whose worldview was so clearly and so thoroughly Jewish? Would most modern Christians benefit by recapturing the Jewish Jesus' vision of the nature...