I met a rare kind of person last week. He was what I’ll describe as a genuinely intelligent person. There are plenty of smart or knowledgeable people around, and given that I spend a lot of time around “academic types” I run into a lot of them from all fields. But there’s a difference between being merely smart, and being truly intelligent. And often it takes meeting a genuinely intelligent person to learn the difference.

[Read more...]

I’m not a big fan of sports analogies or metaphors, especially from the pulpit and in reference to matters spiritual. I find them at least irksome and at times insufferable. When in seminary a local church pastor (whose church we visited often only because of proximity to the seminary) used sports analogies as a staple in his sermons. After a while it was evident that he probably spent more time consulting ESPN than the ISBE.* However, it seems that sports analogies have a long history.

[Read more...]

Christian psychologist and therapist Wayne E. Oates wrote, “Two tuning forks that are alike will pick up each other’s vibrations. Persons are prone to imitate people they like. Therefore, change can be created in another person by stimulating the desire to be like you.” (The Psychology of Religion. Word Books, 1973, p. 157). In 1973 Oates uttered this “true” statement from the standpoint of the emotional and the evident frameworks (direct observation) of psychology. Today the neurosciences can make this same statement. But more and more, their frame of reference is the biological and the scientific.

[Read more...]

I’ve been invited to write a magazine article on artistic interpretations of biblical texts. I enthusiastically accepted the invitation from the editor. Given my lifelong interest in art in general, and religious art in particular, and the fact that I’ve never written (as well as I can recall) anything along these lines made the novelty attractive.

[Read more...]