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

should Christians use marjuana?

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This Week's Recommendations

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This Week's Recommendations

1. Should Christians Use Recreational Marijuana? Kevin VanHoozer offers wisdom to Christians in a nation with broadening availability to recreational marijuana. VanHoozer explains that we need to have an understanding of what marijuana does as well as a biblical understanding of recreation. He says, "'Recreation' originally referred to the process of spiritual refreshment: the act of restoring or reviving the soul. Today, it usually refers to things people do to relax or have fun. Recreation is an activity of leisure—leisure being “free” time. It can be solitary or communal. In either case, it is formative, either spiritually or socially."

2. It's True! Stress Makes Your Hair Grey: Sometimes old wive's tales are real… and I’m living proof of this one! Jennifer Walter reports, "Scientists knew losing these cells in hair follicles robs hair of its luster, but they had yet to pin down the mechanism responsible for triggering the depletion of melanocytes. Now, scientists finally have an answer: the fight-or-flight response."

3. Marriage Was Never Meant to Fill the Empty Spaces: An excellent and intimate reflection by Lauren Washer. She reminds us, "Marriage cannot fill the empty spaces but it helps point us to the God who emptied himself so we could be filled up with the knowledge of him. As we continuously seek to fill ourselves up with the knowledge of God, through his word and through prayer, he fills us with everything we need for life and godliness."

4. Respectable Sins of the Reformed World: Tim Challies offers an important critique of the sins that can go unchecked for Reformed Christians. He concludes his list with this doozy: “Impugning. To impugn is to dispute the truth, validity, or honesty of another person’s motives. And closely connected to disputing another person’s motives is suggesting that you know the truth behind them.”

5. Kangaroo Rats are Furry, Spring-Loaded Ninjas: As an Arizonan I particularly enjoyed these four-minutes. Our Creator has quite the imagination, don't you think?

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