The Lord taught his disciples to pray with a model prayer. The prayer affirms the oneness of humanity under the love of God our Father. The prayer teaches us that God’s reality is apart from the daily experience of humanity.

In Scripture, it is not the language of law that communicates God, it is not the philosophers strenuous exercise in dialectics that communicates God - it is the prophets poetry, the wiseman’s story, the language of the song….

I understand the progressive’s therapeutic need for challenging popular evangelicalism with complaints that reject damaging evangelical beliefs. Evangelicalism’s intolerance for competing ideologies of grace and mercy is troubling. The past century of crisis conversion for masses of people promoted by celebrity evangelists garnering wealth, power, and influence while void of accountability to a community has not produced a cultural ethos consistent with Christ-likeness.

Uncovering the injustices of the past is the most important aspect of historical research for it enables us to understand and correct the present. The calling of historians in its purity is to become beacons of justice and leaders of change. Historical knowledge of the violence, injustice, racism, and greed of the past disassembles false ideologies that govern the present. Historical truth is able to lift the cultural weight of lies from the shoulders of the population who live in a false reality. History’s witness to the failings and inhumane activity of power must preserve the voices of the powerless, the victims of history.

The word faith is often thought of as an abstract word used to denote religious ascent to a specific idea of God. I think that if we are to understand faith, we must first come to terms with faith as a specific part of our created reality. Faith belongs to God and is creatively sown into the fabric of reality. Faith is not an afterthought of God’s, it is not a consequence or result of God’s actions or humanity’s, rather, faith sits at the pinnacle of creative reality. Faith is the pathway to God and Jesus is the embodiment of faith's path.

     To say that homosexuality is a created, or a natural state, is a metaphysical claim. Such a claim voids psychological and sociological effects on the human psyche. Further, this particular claim denies the power of the will in relation to the natural biology of gender.

Perhaps imagination and poetry is more affective for communicating than the modern tools of interpretation? This is the basis for some studies under the label of Theopoetics. I wrote a book of poetry titled Theopoetics as an outlet for my theology in relation to my experiences.

Let's think; it is the work of the Spirit to conform us to the image of God in Christ. The exemplary model of Jesus' life was affirmed in the resurrection. So, we are all supposed to live a life that exhibits 'God in us' to the world. Although Jesus was 'monogenes' (only begotten) he lived a human life, his favorite self-appellation was 'son of man'. I like to say that God became a human being without exception.

The stories of Israel provide, for us as readers, a view on existence that reveals an understanding of God that is more often misunderstood than received. The mixture of God and creation (particularly the human creature) in these stories often leave us with more of a sense of God’s absence than God’s presence. This is so first, because of the overt violence in the stories and secondly because the stories take on a mythical guise with scenes of miraculous intervention, the likes of which none of us has seen.

    I understand God’s nature to be ‘Holy’; God cannot be other than who God is. Certainly, God’s experience of humanity is an unprecedented experience in the life of God, even an adventure. Wrestling to grasp transcendent realities is a limited enterprise! However, the inclusion of the man Jesus as a holy addition into that which constitutes God (divine essence) would not change God’s nature.

     When Jesus brought his ‘self’ to scripture, his readings did not fit the intelligentsia of the age. It was not hermeneutical art that made Jesus’ interpretations original, it was his practice to align scripture with the revelation of God that he knew. This being said, Jesus began with revelation and found the meaning of scripture because of his revelation.

The Blues

     The human capacity to turn sorrow into sweetness begins with tears. Blues songs, in a sense, celebrate sorrow as a sweet reality that can only be resolved through a memory held in the beauty of music. The loss of gospel lament to the feel good ditty of this generations praise songs is to replace facing reality with illusion, even illusory religion. Spirituality faces reality and asks the forbidden questions of religion governed by absolutist ideologies. Spirituality weeps along with the God who weeps.