The name for this blog came from a book I wrote called Jesus Creed: Loving God, Loving Others. That book has one central
theme: that Jesus understood the moral life as one made of two loves —
loving God and loving others. We believe that this vision of Jesus is
not just for the specific behaviors but for all of life — including
how we treat others on a blog. With the Jesus Creed as our theme we aim
in this blog for civil conversation about all topics. (I should add that our Jesus Creed project also has a beautifully-produced DVD and a 40 Day Guide.)

Our
favorite topics are Jesus himself, the Bible, the Christian faith, the
Church today, and we also venture off into topics like coffee and the
Chicago Cubs and what Kris (my wife) and I are doing these days … and
we talk about North Park University, where I teach, and we talk about
politics some. Many of our posts will derive from someone else’s book’s
central ideas and so we talk quite often about books. And we tend to do
books in a series, and one of the books we are presently studying and
conversing about in a civil manner is by J. Kameron Carter. That book
is called Race: A Theological Account. Don’t let the difficulty of
its prose fool you: this is a profound and incredibly practical book
about how theology itself has cloaked racism in its inner workings. I
have asked some other professors to blog along with me.

Another
topic we take up often is science and faith, but I don’t always do
those posts. I ask others to help me, and you will meet “RJS” — a
professor friend who knows her stuff about science.

Please be patient with us as we move our archives over and get the “categories” to the right re-adjusted.

Over the
next two weeks or so I will introduce the Beliefnet.com community to
our writings so for some this might be old hat … but it might be a
good chance for us to think through the central ideas that will shape
this blog.

We come to Beliefnet.com with a community of friends
who have established a civil form of conversation. Yes, over the 3.5
years of blogging on Jesus Creed we have had to add names to our
“moderation” queue and we don’t like doing that. But, because here at
Jesus Creed we value civility so much we find it necessary and helpful
to moderate comments intentionally and carefully.

We value
conversation. If you want to chat with us — join us. We imagine this
community as sitting at a table over coffee with one another. We are
not trying to win, to score points, to insult, or to shame others.
Sometimes someone gets a little sharp with others and we all stand back
and say, “That’s not the way we operate at Jesus Creed.” This community
monitors itself. If you are asked by others to tone it down, please
tone it down. If we want a civil conversation we have to work hard at
protecting one another from insults. And we have to discipline
ourselves to ask this simple question: “Would I talk like this to a
friend over coffee?”