Commonsense Christianity

Recently, I wrote a letter to the editor about an obscenely expensive, $20 million dollar bond our local school district is floating. As a veteran homeschooler who launched four highly literate, analytical, articulate adults into the world of work and home, I’m unconvinced that massive amounts of money, spent without any sense of accountability to…

Full disclosure: we do Easter egg hunts. But then again, we also do Halloween and Santa, and have been remarkably able to separate these particular family traditions from our theological viewpoints. As Christians, it’s important to not only talk, and talk, and talk about our freedom in Christ, but to actually experiment with living it and see how it…

The flood of media love for the Russell Crowe movie, Noah, awashes the brain. It reminds me of Mel Gibson’s 2004 Passion of the Christ, and people are saying the same things now, as they said back then. Let’s look at some of these tedious pronouncements people are making about Noah that echo what they preached during Gibson’s moneymaking affair — because that’s what…

One recent weekend, I made mental plans the eve before for gentle recreation: a little quilting, time in the sun with the strawberry plants and their weeds, a game or two of cribbage with whoever in the family isn’t afraid of my prowess (and hubris). Conspicuously missing from the list was 1) Get violently ill with some sort of…

“When God dies, does He fall down from the sky?” I’m sure it doesn’t take long to identify a few theological misconceptions in this question, but when you consider that the inquirer was a four-year-old, you have to admit a certain profundity of thought. (That’s my granddaughter. She’s amazing. Thank you for agreeing.) My first…

I don’t know about you, but I have been in particular life situations that go on so long, with so little change, that I simply want to give up. Only, I can’t. I mean, what am I supposed to do: pack up all my things and go . . . where? It’s not as if…

You know, for a dead guy, Albert Einstein posts a lot of quotes on Facebook. The latest on my wall is, “If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” While this may be the explanation for my progeny’s…

I was on the last hour of a boring, four-hour drive when I passed one of those stores that sell everything: gas, Chinese food, Pepto Bismo, tax preparation services, and on the reader board they proudly announced: “We have worms for fishing!” Unusual for an establishment like this, they weren’t missing any letters, so it…

On one of my blogs (not this one, so don’t freak out), I can see what phrases people type into the search engine to find me. One that frequently shows up is a variation of this: “Why are Christians so weird?” Before you preen, flattered that our godly and exemplary life is so blessedly different…

My niece has a friend whose son has tumors. At a recent visit to the children’s hospital, they passed by a little girl — 3 years old — surrounded by her stuffed animals. As my niece wrote on Facebook: “She was joyfully telling them all how much she would miss them, (saying) goodbye and how…

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