One of my favorite episodes of The West Wing involves a fictional practice known as Big Block of Cheese Day. Based on Andrew Jackson’s tradition of inviting anybody and everybody to the White House for conversation and to enjoy part…
The Seeing Stones and the surveillance state
There is something almost too on-the-nose about a company named Palantir releasing a manifesto that reads like a love letter to centralized power. Palantir Technologies does not exist in isolation from American political power. It is one node in a…
Thin places, sacred spaces: Why our national parks matter
Driving through the fog gave the air a thickness that seemed to envelop us, to welcome us into a place that fizzled with eternity. A group of friends and I had traveled into the Cades Cove area of the Great…
Learning from the ‘Wise One’
For the past few weeks, I have been enjoying the second season of one of my favorite shows available to stream. There are some Tolkien purists who do not care for the show, but I will not quibble with some…
Why I’ve stayed
On Aug. 27, Alexander Lang preached his last sermon at First Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights, Ill. A few days later, he wrote a column titled “Departure: Why I Left the Church.” Since then, I have seen Lang’s column shared…
The lips of a Tyrannosaurus Rex
I have been obsessed with dinosaurs since childhood. I already loved them before Jurassic Park was released in 1993, but that film certainly solidified both my love and imprinted images of my favorite dinosaurs. And whenever anybody is an awesome-enough-person…
The gospel according to mammals
If I were not a pastor, my life would look very, very different. In fact, after I graduated with an undergraduate degree in anthropology, I had two options to consider: one of my professors encouraged me to apply for an…
YHWH vs. the Singularity
In a recent issue of The Atlantic, novelist and playwright Ayad Akhtar argues that we have now arrived in the age of the Singularity, the hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in never-before-foreseeable…
Reflections on The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill
When I was in college in the mid-2000s, I devoured books by pastors and writers who were labeled “Emergent.” Coming out of my Southern Baptist upbringing, I was drawn to expressions of Christianity that seemed to engage culture not as…
A home for outcasts or a keeper of the ‘sacred timeline’?
Recently my family and I have been watching Loki on Disney+. For those of you unfamiliar with the world of the Marvel universe, Loki is the god of mischief and an archvillain of the Avengers. At the beginning of the…
Why I’ll remember 2021 as ‘The Year with Two Easters’
I may refer to 2020 as “The Year Without an Easter.” That is certainly how it felt to me, at least. I had been serving as pastor of Ardmore Baptist Church for less than seven months before the global pandemic…