“Blown right out into vacuum. All of them.” To this day, I can remember hearing those words as clearly as I’d first heard them, cutting through the mental fog that was my usual companion in those days. I sat at the bar, holding a — fleg, I don’t know —…

Turns out they suck at jokes and crosswords — A few weeks ago, largely out of boredom, I asked ChatGPT to tell me a joke. It responded with a pun: “Why don’t scientists trust atoms? Because they make up everything.” I asked ChatGPT if it could tell me a joke that wasn’t a pun. It told me the same…

Nearly twenty-two years ago, I set out on what I thought would be a fun intellectual exercise: translate the Gospel of Mark into a new kind of English translation. In seminary, I came to love the Gospel of Mark because of its emphasis on Jesus’ humanity, its radical call to discipleship, and its subversive nature. It seemed appropriate to try my hand at translating this remarkable gospel. Who knew that what would be a fun little side project as a seminary student would take over two decades to complete?

On a recent road trip to Florida, I saw a lot of billboards about religion. I’d seen a few of these billboards on other trips to the South, but this extended ride down the southern East Coast allowed me to understand that these were all part of a single campaign, all sponsored by the same individual(s), with the same phone number at the bottom. These billboards were clearly part of a single theological viewpoint. And that theological viewpoint is terrible.

I have done a lot of reflection in recent years on the nature of my religious faith. I was raised in, trained in, and have worked in a mainline Protestant Christian religious tradition. That worldview shapes my theology, philosophy, and experience of the world; it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t. …

This article suffers from Christopher Hitchens Syndrome: the conflation of religion with God. It essentially says, "I have shown that one belief held by a subset of religious people is unlikely to be true given my limited understanding, THEREFORE THERE IS NO GOD." It's amazing how many of these articles I read as a Christian agreeing with everything up until the last proposition. All of them take a leap that is unjustifiable, primarily because the authors of articles like these do not contemplate the existence of believers like me who accept science and evolution, and find them compatible with faith. These authors seem not to understand that disproving creationism is a proof against creationism—it's not a proof against God.

Let us imagine two people are having a conversation about love. The first one says, “Love is tumbling headlong through a field of fragrant wildflowers.” “No it isn’t, you fool!” shouts the second. “Love is being drunk on the sweetest wine!” To us, this seems a preposterous situation because there…

“I really loved you.” There it was— a voiced alveolar-dental stop placed on the end of the word. “I really loved you.” And in that brief articulation —the tongue tapping against the little ridge above the teeth, the vocal cords humming away— my world fell apart. Nothing can disrupt the present or foreclose the future like the past tense. That little pop told me that the things I had hoped for, prayed for— now lay in the unretrievable past.

I recognized my antagonist right away; I didn’t know who he was, but I recognized him. Or her. Too early to tell. He walked in out of the night into the bar, wearing a long woolen winter coat. …