Notes from the margins
A reading room.
Slow notes on faith, scripture, and the days in between — with the occasional tech footnote.
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The Day I Rode My Bicycle into the Eye of a Hurricane
There are only a handful of childhood memories that remain crystal clear more than sixty years later. One of mine happened on a September afternoon in 1960, when I was eight years old and living just a block north of the Gulf of Mexico in Biloxi, Mississippi. Our home stood on Father Ryan Avenue, under…
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The Future of Israel: Why the Church Hasn’t Replaced God’s First People
We have a tendency to treat the Bible like a software update. We look at the Old Testament as "Beta 1.0": clunky, localized, and eventually superseded by the sleek, universal "Church 2.0" of the New Testament. In this "tame" modern paradigm, the ethnic people of Israel are often viewed as a temporary scaffolding, useful for…
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“Today You Will Be With Me in Paradise”: The Stunning Theology Behind Jesus’ Words to the Thief on the Cross
One of the most profound statements Jesus ever made came while He was dying. Hanging on the cross beside a criminal, Jesus said: “Truly I say to you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.” Luke 23:43 At first glance, it feels simple and comforting. But underneath that sentence is an enormous amount of…
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Why Michael S. Heiser Will Change the Way You Read Your Bible
We often approach the Bible like a tame garden, well-manicured, predictable, and safely fenced off from the "weirdness" of the ancient world. We’ve been conditioned by centuries of modern rationalism to treat the Scriptures as a collection of moral aphorisms or a systematic checklist for legal standing. But what if we’ve been reading it in…
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Why I Started a Personal Blog: Sharing a Supernatural Worldview in a Secular Age
We live in a world that has been systematically drained of its mystery. In our modern, secular age, we are often encouraged to view the cosmos as a cold, mechanical clock: a closed system governed by physics and biological imperatives. This is what we might call a “tame” worldview. It is comfortable, predictable, and ultimately…
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Why the Bible Needs to Get Weird Again
5 Surprising Lessons from the Book of Enoch For many modern readers, the Bible has been “tamed.” We have smoothed over its rough edges and sanitized its supernatural elements to fit within a comfortable, scientific paradigm. In doing so, we risk turning the text into a mere mirror, where we see only reflections of our…
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Christianity Today: Can Anger at God be Righteous?
The Psalms show us how to faithfully protest to God. J. Todd Billings| December 28, 2018 After I was diagnosed with cancer five years ago, I returned to the Book of Psalms anew. I started to pray with psalms that I had merely read before or had skipped altogether. While I was receiving intense chemo,…
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Thoughts on Pain (from Jack Deere)
The fact that someone else’s catastrophe is greater than mine has never made my pain feel better. I have never overcome my pain by comparing it to someone else’s pain. I have never overcome my pain by reasoning myself out of it, nor has it helped to seek comfort in some version of theology that…
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