Christian Living, Biblical Studies, Religion, Spiritual Growth, Theology
John Beeson
The Faith of Unbelief

Bart Ehrman has perhaps done more to undermine the credibility of the Bible than anyone else in my lifetime. But his story didn’t begin that way. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and skeptic. Ehrman grew up in a Christian home, attended a conservative Bible school, and then found his way to a liberal seminary where his faith in the God of the Bible unraveled. That seminary happens to be the seminary I would attend a couple of decades later.

For Ehrman, everywhere he looks he sees holes in the biblical story. The inconsistencies that he sees have led him to determine that he cannot trust in the God of the Bible.

The Faith of Unbelief
Christian Living, Culture, Spiritual Growth
John Beeson
Don't Numb Your Feelings

“Don’t listen to your feelings; remember what Jesus did for you!”

“Don’t be guided by your feelings; listen to what God commands you to do!”

In just the past week, I heard both of these warnings. Two very different Christian speakers urged their audiences to shut down their feelings. These admonitions resonate. They contain truth. It is correct that our feelings don’t override truth, nor do our emotions negate what God has done. Neither do our feelings give us an out for what God commands us to do.

Don't Numb Your Feelings
History, Spiritual Growth, Suffering, Wisdom
John Beeson
Lord, Reach Your Justice Down

I had outsized emotions as a child. Games, especially, would get the best of me, whether cards or boardgames or sports. In response to a stroke of bad luck, a hot surge of anger would erupt, followed quickly by tears and then embarrassment.

Emotions are God’s gift to us in many ways. They are one of his kind ways of showing us where our deep attachments lie.

Our son started his freshman year at the University of Arizona this fall. It’s been a great experience for him, but not without its adjustments. The climate of a secular school is quite different than the Christian school he graduated from

Lord, Reach Your Justice Down
Culture, Generosity, Nature, Relationships
John Beeson
Marshmallows and Friends

Most have heard of the famous Stanford marshmallow experiment. In 1970, psychologist Walter Mischel invited kids into his lab. A child was offered a marshmallow that they could eat, or, if they waited until the researcher returned, they were given a second marshmallow. About one-third of the kids waited approximately fifteen minutes for the additional reward.

The study then tracked those children over time and found that children who waited for the second reward tended to have higher SAT scores and lower body mass indexes. Later tests have challenged those outcomes, but it hasn’t stopped parents everywhere from running the experiment on their kids, often with humorous results.

Marshmallows and Friends
Christian Living, Culture, Politics
John Beeson
Uprooting Our Political Identity

Happy election day!

In 2016, data scientists Eitan Hersh and Yair Ghitza analyzed data among registered voters to determine how often Democrats and Republicans married. They learned that 9% of marriages had the spouses registered in the two parties. Over the next four years that meager number would drop precipitously, down to 4%.

 As Jonathan Haidt and others have successfully argued, the ideological disparity between FOX News and CNBC are child’s play compared to the engineered social media algorithms that create hermetically sealed echo chambers for our political views.

Uprooting Our Political Identity

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

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"Beauty Will Save the World"

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"Beauty Will Save the World"

“Beauty will save the world,” the great Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky once wrote. Dostoyevsky was no starry-eyed dreamer. But we must confess that, given the world we live in, Dostoyevsky’s proclamation has the ring of naïvete to it. But is it possible that Dostoyevsky might be right? What if, in these troubled times beauty can save the world?

Fellow Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who lived through the great purge (and likewise would have never been accused of being naïve) wrestled with Dostoyevsky’s proclamation in his 1970 Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

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What I Read in 2021 (and Maybe What You Should Read in 2022)

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What I Read in 2021 (and Maybe What You Should Read in 2022)

I’ve been able to hit the 100-plateau of books the past few years. This year I read 111 books (the symmetry of that number made me smile). If you wonder how I read that much, this post might help spur you on and provide some practical pointers in your reading journey in 2022. I love reading for many reasons. It’s a gift to be in conversation with a multitude of wise voices, to be invited into the imaginative worlds of some of the best minds of our time, and to grow in empathy and understanding as I step into the shoes of those very different from myself.

I love the gift of reading books with friends. Most of the books I read are recommended by friends and I love it when friends read a book I recommend. If you read any of the books recommended below, I would love to hear what you think. And I would love to hear what your favorite books of 2021 were. If you want fuller reviews on any of the books listed above or just want to connect on an ongoing basis about reading, I encourage you to friend me on Goodreads.

Let me start with my three favorite books of 2021, and then we will get to the rest of the action:

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