What you must realize, what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all. The most blinding illumination that strikes and perhaps radically changes your life will be so attenuated and obscured by doubts and dailiness thatContinue reading “Another Look: No Right Way Once and For All”
Category Archives: Spiritual Formation
Sunday with Michael Spencer: The lived spiritual life is a frequent contradiction
Sunday with Michael Spencer The lived spiritual life is a frequent contradiction I remember the depths of my own dark night in September of 2001. I was at the point of breaking down and being unable to preach or teach, a condition I had never faced before. I was as far from God as itContinue reading “Sunday with Michael Spencer: The lived spiritual life is a frequent contradiction”
Reconstruction
I AM A PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN because I believe that doubting, questioning and searching is a legitimate and mature expression of faith, and that for many Christians a season of deconstruction is a necessary and vital part of the faith journey. I AM A POST-PROGRESSIVE CHRISTIAN because I believe a faith journey that terminates and exhaustsContinue reading “Reconstruction”
Another Look: Seasons and Paths of Formation
Another Look: Seasons and Paths of Formation Little children, I’m writing to you because your sins have been forgiven through Jesus’ name. Parents, I’m writing to you because you have known the one who has existed from the beginning. Young people, I’m writing to you because you have conquered the evil one. Little children, I write toContinue reading “Another Look: Seasons and Paths of Formation”
Wednesday with Michael Spencer: Why People Get Upset that I’ve Changed (and Am Changing)
Wednesday with Michael Spencer From 2008 I can now officially say I’ve written my most controversial sentence. It’s various versions of “I am rethinking what I believe about God.” I know. I know. Somehow this has been translated into “I’m no longer a Christian,” “I’m abandoning Christianity,” and “I’m ordering anchovies on that pizza.” WhyContinue reading “Wednesday with Michael Spencer: Why People Get Upset that I’ve Changed (and Am Changing)”
Wednesday with Michael Spencer: Confessions of a Poor Player
Wednesday with Michael Spencer Confessions of a Poor Player (2009) I love chess. I’ve loved it since I was a kid. I’ve kept my first chess sets. I can recall every hand held set I ever took to school when I was told not to. I still stalk ebay looking for a particular plastic setContinue reading “Wednesday with Michael Spencer: Confessions of a Poor Player”
Daring to Pray the Our Father (2)
Daring to Pray the Our Father (2) However, even if we have mastered the words of a prayer, it often remains someone else’s prayer. We may never quite get into it. It may never express the thoughts of our minds or the feelings of our hearts. We say it more out of conditioning than genuineContinue reading “Daring to Pray the Our Father (2)”
Sunday with Christian Wiman: Anxieties that have become useful to us
There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of completeContinue reading “Sunday with Christian Wiman: Anxieties that have become useful to us”
Sunday with Christian Wiman: No half-remembered country
Sunday with Christian Wiman No half-remembered country In fact, there is no way to “return to the faith of your childhood,” not really, not unless you’ve just woken from a decades-long and absolutely literal coma. Faith is not some half-remembered country into which you come like a long-exiled king, dispensing the old wisdom, casting outContinue reading “Sunday with Christian Wiman: No half-remembered country”
Another Look: The Contexts of Faith
Much Christian piety and spirituality is romantic and unreal in its positiveness. As children of the Enlightenment, we have censored and selected around the voice of darkness and disorientation, seeking to go from strength to strength, from victory to victory. But such a way not only ignores the Psalms; it is a lie in termsContinue reading “Another Look: The Contexts of Faith”
The Internet Monk Archives 