Our latest episode, featuring me, Rob Stennett, and Joy Bennett. We discuss the passing of Roger Ebert, The Lone Bellow, House of Cards, the art of North Korea, Jurassic Park 3D, our favorite children’s books, and more.
All the links here. Subscribe to the podcast here.
Brennan Manning died last Friday, April 12, 2013. I say this with no hyperbole at all: no person on earth impacted my faith and theology more than Brennan Francis Xavier Manning. And as curious as it may sound, his impact on my faith was both positive and negative.
Positive because his teaching about grace blew my conservative-fundamentalist mind at a time when it needed to be blown. Upon reading The Ragamuffin Gospel at the recommendation of Rich Mullins, I knew I would never be the same.
Negative because his teaching sent me on a path of discovery and reading outside my narrow Southern Baptist faith tradition. That’s always dangerous. And the questions that make my relationship to Christian faith today a very tenuous one are the direct result of the journey I began back then when I dug into Manning…and then dug into his theological influences. I read footnotes. I followed suggestions. I couldn’t stop reading.
To expand, here’s an excerpt from an essay I’ve written for inclusion in a book about fatherhood, scheduled to release in 2014:
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Though rich and loving, my childhood faith tradition was also narrow. In my early twenties, I set out from that base camp to explore the religious world beyond it. My interest in the musician Rich Mullins introduced me to the contemplative Catholicism of Brennan Manning. Manning’s writing on grace, so helpful to undo the restrictive legalism of my youth, brought me to writers like Henri Nouwen and Frederick Buechner. From there, I found my way to John Polkinghorne, N. T. Wright, and Robert Farrar Capon, and then Marcus Borg, Jaroslav Pelikan, Bart Ehrman. It’s a lengthy list.
The weight of this new knowledge began to press against my beliefs. Small imperfections grew into larger flaws. Cracks spread through the foundation, one after another until I looked down, years later, and saw that my faith was mostly rubble. My bedrock devotion to a literal understanding of the Bible crumbled into a more contextualized reading of Scripture. I love the Bible, but I read it as an ancient collection of documents that owe more to their human authors than the Holy Spirit’s dictation. I spent the first two decades of my life fearing hell, and have spent the last two decades wondering if I believe in it at all. I no longer doubt my salvation; today I doubt whether God exists.
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Brennan Manning saved my faith. Brennan Manning started me on the road to dismantling my faith. I love him for both of those things.
Our latest episode, featuring me, Joy Bennett, and special guest Sharideth Smith. We discuss The Features, First Aid Kit, Top Gear, wireless speakers, anti-social media blocking software, Afrin nasal spray, and more.
All the links here. Subscribe to the podcast here.
I’ve got a new Deeper Story column up today, about the big conniption thrown when Marcus Mumford stated in Rolling Stone that he doesn’t really want to label himself a Christian.
In the piece, I try to examine why Christians put so much stock in celebrities who share their beliefs, and what it might say about our own faith. Also I tiptoe around the Old Testament story of Naaman.
We’re so obsessed with the big thing (or person) we forget that faith is more often about the small things (or people).
Read the whole piece here, and feel free to leave a comment (there or here).
Last weekend I spoke at the Killer Tribes conference in Atlanta, where I hung out with former 9 Thumbs host Matthew Paul Turner, new host Joy Bennett, recent guest host Kristen Howerton, our mutual podcaster buddy Sharideth Smith, and lots of other great friends. Joy and I took advantage of everyone’s proximity to do an interview with Kristen and Sharideth about blogging and writing. Because we pursue awesomeness, we recorded it in a children’s Sunday School room in a church basement.
My wife, Aimee, took this photo:
Yes, those are some of the “fruits of the Spirit” painted on the wall behind us.
My sister, Micha, is a fantastic blogger and poet and just signed a two-book deal with Worthy Publishing.
Yesterday, she asked me to guest-post on her blog as part of her “One Good Phrase” series (for which I designed the graphic, above, btw). The series asks contributors to describe a phrase that has wormed its way into your life, repeating and repeating enough that it has become a part of you.
I chose “What song would you like to sing?” It’s a question I ask my kids every night. We sing silly, made-up songs together nightly before bed. It’s our ritual.
In fact, it has been our ritual since they were toddlers. They’re not toddlers now, but we still do it. An excerpt:
I still offer them a song every night, just because I can. Because they’ll still let me. Because I know this time is fleeting. Because I know one day they’ll decide they’re too old to sing with Dad.
Check out the full post here—don’t miss the video of us singing at the end!—and be sure to dig through the other posts in the series while you’re there.
Here’s a design-ey something we recently put together.
We have a pretty big living room with vaulted, sloped ceilings, which means we’ve always had one wall that was just really, really big. We’ve tried a variety of things to fill the space without a lot of success.
Then we got a Groupon offer with a ridiculous discount for gallery-wrapped photos on canvas. A 16x20-in, 1.5-in. thick canvas—usually $127—for a third that price. So we bought several and decided to wedge them all together on the wall to make a giant collage (with a larger 20x30-in. canvas in the middle).
Thanks, Ty Pennington!
We’ve tried these gallery-wrapped canvas Groupon deals before using color photos and have generally been disappointed. The colors in the final product always ended up way too saturated. As in: we all had magenta-to-purple lips. (In real life, we have lips of lovely, and quite average, pinkness.)
So this time we decided to take some of our favorite family photos—some old, some more recent—and turn them all black and white. Surely we wouldn’t end up purple-lipped this way.
Using Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop (I’m a designer), we figured out our favorite arrangement of the photos and their orientation. I made sure to increase the contrast once we desaturated them so they weren’t too grayed out.
We were pleased with the results from Canvas on Demand. Excellent printing. (Finally.)
It took a lot of measuring and at least a couple of readjustments, but we finally got all the canvasses in place on the wall. This is harder than you’d think when they’re supposed to all touch.
We’re very happy with the end result. It fills up the wall, the black-and-white offers a good contrast with the neutral paint job, and it’s pretty eye-catching. Even better, it was far less expensive than it could have been.
What I’m currently reading… Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain.
From p. 63:
“Studies have shown that, indeed, introverts are more likely than extroverts to express intimate facts about themselves online that their family and friends would be surprised to read, to say that they can express the ‘real me’ online, and to spend more time in certain kinds of online discussions. They welcome the chance to communicate digitally. The same person who would never raise his hand in a lecture hall of two hundred people might blog to two thousand, or two million, without thinking twice. The same person who finds it difficult to introduce himself to strangers might establish a presence online and then extend these relationships into the real world.”
This is so me, it’s ridiculous. To the chagrin of my family and IRL friends, I’ve always found it way easier to be transparent online rather than in the flesh. And have always thought that was a really peculiar thing. I guess I’m not so strange after all.
I have a new writing gig! My friends at Deeper Story have asked me to contribute a monthly column on faith and popular culture. It will usually run on the first Tuesday of the month.
If you were wondering, the title of the column comes from one of Flannery O’Connor’s letters in The Habit of Being: “I can with one eye squinted take it all as a blessing.” (I love Flannery O’Connor.)
Our latest episode isn’t new. It’s a rerun of Episode #32, because I got too busy last week and couldn’t record. This one published right after the giant Powerball Lottery payout several months ago, so we asked ourselves what would be our “likes” if we suddenly had millions of dollars to spend. It’s our high-rollers episode!
All the links here. Subscribe to the podcast here.
