I told a friend recently that if he wanted to gain confidence as a public speaker, he should practice. I told him to just accept any invitation, large or small, and get some hours down.

He thanked me but also mentioned he wanted his confidence to come from God, from his faith. He wasn’t being snooty or anything, trying to passively let me know what a great Christian he was, because if he’d been doing that, I’d just have shrugged my [...]

About three weeks ago, I was fifty or so flight of stairs into my workout. I’m going to try to climb Mt. Hood in early June. The training has gone okay, but I have my doubts. I’ve not lost the weight I thought I’d lose, to be honest. That happened when I trained to ride my bike across the country, too, and everything turned out fine. And yet I worried. What if I didn’t make it? I started feeling [...]

In your opinion, is being a jerk heresy?

I only ask this because it seems we’ve lost touch with a true, holistic understanding of communication, believing as long as our ideas are theologically or philosophically true, we can present those truths through an offensive methodology. If you ask me, it’s a trick.

In a perfect world, people would make decisions about what they believe based on it’s philosophical merit, but that isn’t how people decide what is true at all. The [...]

I first heard Ryan Bingham on a late-night drive from Dallas to Abilene. There’s a terrific radio station in Dallas called The Ranch (95.5) that plays a lot of traditional country music, mostly Texas based. I’d flown in and found the station and it kept me country along that beautiful road of rolling hills when a song came on that I liked so much I pulled out my i-phone and recorded enough of it I could research and find [...]

I’ve always wondered why people who believe in total depravity say things to their kids like “good job” when they catch a baseball. Shouldn’t they say something like you caught the ball, but you still deserve to go to hell?

I’ve never really trusted people who believed we were totally depraved, for obvious reasons. How can their view of the world be trusted? They are totally depraved, after all.

A pastor friend told me recently, though, that the term total depravity [...]

Have you ever noticed Calvinists think in black and white? And I’m not just talking about their theology, I mean they think in black and white about everything? And have you noticed that people who obsess about the second coming also like science fiction books? Of course those are general statements, and the most offensive thing you can say to a twenty-something is that people might have common characteristics (they hear “nobody is original”) but, honestly, and I mean [...]

I met a new friend recently who made cell phones. His company made smart phones, I don’t remember which ones, but lots of the ones that aren’t the I-phones. He was brilliant to talk to, and socially conscious, too. What I mean is, he actually spent time wondering what his products were doing to the social landscape, how the creation of a particular phone changed the way people lived their lives. And he wondered whether people’s lives were changed [...]

A couple times at a church I’m familiar with, here in Portland, the lead pastor, has very kindly asked people to leave. I remember a specific time he just stood up and asked how many people had been coming to church for a year or more but hadn’t found a way to plug into the community. He then invited them to plug in, (which at this church means to serve or find a home group or work in a [...]

This Sunday please enjoy country traditionalist Justin Townes Earle followed by Nashville recording artist Butterfly Boucher. Townes was born in Nashville and is the son of the remarkable Steve Earle (fitting that last week we featured the son of Bob Dylan) and was named after Steve Earle’s hero Townes Van Zandt. Townes played with the Distributors and the Swindlers before playing guitar and keyboards for his fathers band, the Dukes but was fired for his appetite for drugs. Now [...]