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On Brokenness, Part 1
I've noticed the church in America has a great many problems. I've noticed this sometimes while I was personally contributing to them. In the process, however, I think I may have realized a central...
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Protocolphobia
Back in October, the Broadway-blogging community was peeing on itself with laughter over a Frequently Asked Questions page from the play Lombardi. Evidently, the producers felt that they would be...
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I'll Need That in Writing
Sometimes I wonder whether, when we ask this: I worried about this a lot when I was a kid ... God kind of hears it like this: Nothing says "I love you" quite like "Specify your minimum requirements!"...
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On Brokenness, Part 2
(This post was edited June 26, 2011) It has been my observation that, deep down, a lot of American Christians - regardless of the language we use or the bumper stickers we affix to our vehicle's rear...
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Chris vs May in Boston
Today, mercifully, the highs are in the 80's, so it may be hard to remember that, all of a couple weeks ago, it was in the 40's here in Quincy. In case you were wondering (and we all know you were),...
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Nerdy Kids Can Help Too
Beating Dragon Warrior II ought to be worth $100, easy. Hey, why not? Not every kid can handle Relay for Life, after all, without dying of an asthma attack. (Donate to the fight against Cystic...
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On Brokenness, Part 2.5
Ok, so I'm not quite ready yet to go into the Sermon on the Mount, like I said I was in the last installment... there's a metaphor I wanted to talk about first (and nothing sells a post like knowing...
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Pish-tosh
Sometimes faith is a matter of saying "pish-tosh" to different things, like the internet. The internet gets a really big kick out of ramping up folks with medical anxiety, such as me. First, there's...
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A Very Serious Note on Sentimentality
Esteemed theologian Stanley "H-Dawg" Hauerwas is known to have blamed a great deal of society and the church's problems on "sentimentality." (I'd provide a link, but that seemed like work.) Well, I...
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That Memorial Day Feeling
As the church struggles to figure out what to do with young males, sometimes it's helpful to plumb the depths of the male psyche in an effort to understand just what the heck is going on in there,...
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Who Doesn't Love Ambiguity?
Sometimes I pray a certain frustrated prayer to God. I wonder if His response might go like this: Well, I guess this is less a prayer and more me talking to the wall. I'm probably reading II...
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Brokenness, Part 3
I'm a huge* fan of Jesus's "Sermon on the Mount," and not necessarily because it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, as though I had swallowed a live beaver -- in fact, rather the opposite. I...
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A Brief Note on Narratives
Is there anything more powerful than a meta-narrative? To quote Oscar Wilde, "no." By meta-narrative, of course, I mean the big story that we all tell to explain our place in the universe - usually...
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Reconciling Mercy and Justice
The idea that God is both completely just and completely merciful is hard to fathom. But yet God is both, and both abundantly - after all, mercy without justice is meaningless, and justice without...
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A Cinderella Story
Have you ever noticed how practically every time they interview the creators of an animated feature film, they say something like: If they really wanted to be unique, how about "Our heroine will have a...
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Patience Fail
I know patience is a fruit of the spirit, but there are plenty of times when I feel like I'm coming up short, for example, whenever I'm crossing the Neponset River bridge into Dorchester. I imagine,...
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A Lonely Dog's Story
So my housemates have been gone on vacation for the last week, leaving me alone in a big house with their various four-legged dependents. Naturally, in such a situation, I follow my standard procedure...
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On Brokenness, Part 4
Previously, on Brokenness... When we last left our hero, Cartoon Chris was having all his rationalizations and beliefs in his own human decency obliterated, one by one, by chapter 5 of the Sermon on...
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The Difference Between Me and a Two-Year-Old
There's supposed to be a dining room table on that carpet, but I couldn't figure out how to draw it, so for this cartoon, it got eaten by termites. My internal monologue has better punctuation, for...
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On Brokenness, Part 5
So in our last installment, poor Cartoon Chris was having all his self-justifications systematically mutilated by Jesus's famous Sermon on the Mount - only a few self-justifications remain: Hey Chris,...
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