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Preacher's Kid: Honest Faith, Real World

Sometimes, you need a crazy, loud or even obnoxious prophet to shake people up, make them rethink the slippery moral slope they are on and make a commitment to turn around and do what’s right. John the Baptist, who identified himself as “the voice of one crying in the wilderness,“ knew about confronting the evil of…

Nearly 2,200 years ago, members of such Jewish sects as the Essenes secreted nearly 1,000 biblical and related Jewish texts and records in caves along the northwestern shore of the Dead Sea. As preservation goes, their instincts were pretty good. The dry desert air and isolated location of these document caches kept some of the…

I first caught the disconnect between the fundamentalist Christian upbringing I had, and what Jesus actually taught, when it came to the question of war.  In Sunday school, this preacher’s progeny, along with the other kids, would be led in such songs as “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “I’m the Lord’s Army.” If the Sunday School…

The class I both hated the most, and was most intrigued by in college was the Philosophy of Logic. And the segment of that class that triggered a migraine was one using various stages and methods of “sequential calculus” to explore logic-based arguments for and against the existence of God. On one day, I left…

So, Baylor University says, 20 percent of Americans are convinced that the Creator of the Universe, He Who Holds Existence in His Mind, the Prime Mover, i.e., God . . . actively involves Himself in the world’s economy. And, one in five Americans believe The Lord really, really likes the “free market” concept. You know, the…

It’s inevitable. There you are, possibly dozing off mid-way through your pastor’s sermon when he pulls this out of his ecclesiastical hat: “In the original Greek” . . . or original Hebrew, or Aramaic, etc. So much for those Sunday morning daydreams. Time to pay attention, because just as inevitable is that there will be…

Stress. Worry. Sleepless nights. These plagues of the psyche are as common to humankind as the need to breathe, eat and love. And just as true, the former also are proven to be detrimental to the latter. Too much stress can, quite literally, shorten your life. Worry? Researchers have found that when it becomes consuming,…

There was a time, many years ago now, when I used to watch Pat Robertson’s “700 Club” and think it was a pretty good program. It had inspiring stories of faith, outreach and emergency aid programs. It was an example of Christian activism in the community. It till offers those things, but at some point,…

The Golden Rule. The Law of Reciprocity. What Goes Around . . . You get the idea. Jesus said: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (Matthew 7:12 KJV). Tell some of my Christian brothers and sisters that Jesus didn’t express that concept first, and they look at you like you…

George Barna, the dean of evangelical Christianity research, says the traditional, American model for “born again” faith just isn’t working. That model, which I became intimately familiar with growing up in the home of a fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian preacher, goes like this: “Whatever your problems, Jesus is the answer. Say the ‘Sinner’s Prayer,‘ accept Christ…
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