The values that I seek to foster on a daily basis reflect my understanding of God’s redemptive purposes on earth. I believe that as a “follower of Jesus,” I should seek to “partner with God” toward the realization of these purposes, which, in a manner that I cannot begin to comprehend, will be “fully realized” […]
My last Musing (“Seeing Through Partisan Politics or the Eyes of Jesus”) raised some important questions that were left unanswered; questions that beg for more in-depth analysis. What follows is a coherent set of four essays that provide this “deeper” analysis The first essay by Harold Heie poses and reflects on the overarching question posed […]
For my new Musings into the near future, I will often follow a pattern of posting two back-to-back Musings that are inter-related. The first Musing will be directed primarily to users of social media; it will be relatively brief, using “popular language” that can easily and quickly digested. The follow-up Musing will be geared to […]
Jesus was not spared the temptation to become all-powerful. Tim Alberta starts his thought-provoking book The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, by quoting the following words recorded in Luke 4:5-8 (KJ21): And the devil, taking Him up into a high mountain, showed unto Him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of […]
In our increasingly polarized and tribalistic culture, the desire to exert power over others is rampant. I point my readers to two examples. In the political realm, it appears that many politicians will do most anything to get elected to legislative office, or re-elected once in office. Why is that? It is my belief that […]
In the past 25 years, 40 million persons in America (15% of the USA population) who self-identify as “Evangelicals” have left the institutional church. Why is that? And is there a way to “bring them back?” In in their excellent book The Great Dechurching, Jim Davis and Michael Graham, with Ryan P Burge, wrestle with […]
In the pietistic Lutheran sub-culture into which I was born and raised, we were led to believe in a very narrow view of God’s Redemptive purposes: God only wishes to redeem individual persons. In 1972 I began to seriously question that narrow view of redemption during a sabbatical leave while teaching mathematics at The King’s […]
My desire to understand the truth about all aspects of our world is insatiable. After 40 years of serving as a teacher and academic administrator at four Christian liberal arts colleges, I formulated a description of higher education at its best in just three words: “Conversations Seeking Truth.” But the goal of uncovering the truth […]
I recently had the delightful experience of reading a book that beautifully captured a number of my deeply held beliefs about the nature of my commitment to the Christian faith. Especially gratifying was the fact that the author, Gerald L. Sittser, and I served together as members of the administration at Northwestern College in Iowa […]
Numerous Christian churches, and their denominations, are being torn apart by an inability to orchestrate respectful conversations among members who strongly disagree regarding human sexuality issues. This is especially true for the issue of same-sex marriage, where the major disagreement is between those who hold to a “traditional” view of marriage (God intends for marriage […]
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