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Commonsense Christianity

It is an never-ending source of comfort to be me that I am so frequently wrong. Never-ending, because on a daily basis I manage to miss the mark more than once, whether I’m talking about the weather or making a mental judgment of someone’s character: I’m wrong a lot. This is not an admission easily…

You don’t have to be a student of political science to recognize that there is no perfect, man-made governing system. Even democracy — which is not what we live under in the United States — works better on paper, or parchment, than it does in real life because, though we theoretically operate with the concept that every…

I am writing this with a psychotic cat sleeping on my lap. I recognize that, to people who don’t like cats (and even to many who do), ALL cats are psychotic, but this one is a rescue kitty, chosen by one of our adult children who wanted an animal to keep her company in her apartment, an apartment…

There is a tiresome joke among Christians about patience that goes like this: “I don’t want to pray for patience, because by golly, God will send me all sorts of circumstances to try it!” Ha Ha. What’s not so funny is that, deep down, many people actually believe this, reflecting their impression of a marionette…

The problem with New Year’s resolutions isn’t that they’re easy to make and difficult to keep — which is true on both counts — it’s that we feel like such failures when we fall, and give up, mid-February, on the notion of changing for the better. While it’s always good to change for the better,…

Saying Thank You to God does not have to be a chore — but then again, given the way we are instructed to do things within a cold, contemporary, corporate Christian environment, it is a bit difficult: “We must thank God for everything,” we are admonished, or . . . what? He’ll kick us? Actually,…

For many people, the one thing that stands between their leaving a church situation that is not working for them, or staying within and being unhappy, is friendship. Understandably, wherever we spend our time is where we make friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and social connections, and in a society that is increasingly distant and preoccupied, church is one…

Leaving church — whether a specific fellowship or the industrial model altogether — is not a decision people make lightly. Nor is it one that others take well, and if you are in the process of dropping out of a particular body or the entire conventional, establishment fellowship (i.e., multiple weekly meetings at a specific…

It’s time to bring to a close the age-old debate about whether dogs or cats — and the people who prefer one to the other — are smarter. Not because the general populace has accepted the final resolution of the issue (easy — cats, paws down), but because we have a more pressing question: Are house…

Nowadays, dystopia is the rage. Books like The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Maze Runner seem written for the sole purpose of being turned into movies, with a concerted effort to engage today’s youth into the idea that life, and the future, are hopeless. A highly promoted genre, dystopian fare addresses a (theoretically, set far-in-the-future) society characterized by overcrowding,…
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