Is there anything more frustrating than a bloviating ex-evangelical? I really struggle with people like Brian McLaren. For years I have tried to understand why I struggle with him. He seems like a nice enough guy. Finally, as I was listening to him talk with Diana Butler Bass, I realized what it was. There simply…
If you recognize the title of this post as the title of a song, congratulations! You, too, are officially old - or you have a sibling who is. You will also know the significance of a brand new pair of roller skates, but I digress. After all, what good are the roller skates without a…
I confess that I am one of those strange people who thinks about God a lot. I am also inclined to believe that when we think about God, we think too small. This is because we start from a place of traditional God definitions. We start with the God of our great grandfathers, determine what…
Church historian and author Diana Butler Bass suggests that the questions people ask of religion have historically been "what?" questions. What should I believe? What do I need to know? These are questions religion is uniquely situated to answer. They are the questions of my patents' generation, a generation born before, during, and shortly after…
While it is a bit of an oversimplification, there are essentially two perspectives within institutional Christianity. One says that belief is a matter of memorizing facts, scripture, and doctrine. Success in this view is like passing a final exam. Entering through the gates of heaven in this view involves taking a test on an IPad.…
Wait just a minute - some of you are either lying, overestimating yourselves, or both. I suppose it can't be avoided. Read on. If, at the end of this article you decide what I wrote was nonsense then all I can say is, "I told you so." I have been knocking around the spiritual world…
Oh yes, everyone is wounded. Me too. I understand. You have all been broken and it's terribly unfair. Of course we all haven't been wounded in the same degree or in the same way, nevertheless we are wounded. Someone or several someones have damaged us unfairly. It never should have happened. Can we stipulate to…
...unless you are willing to admit our flaws. Americans are a horribly inconsistent bunch. We expect things we have no reason to expect, for which there is no evidence of even te possibility of manifestation, but not only do we expect them we also become enraged when we don't get them. Some of that is…
Do Americans even know what they want any longer? Most of the knee jerk answers people offer when asked what they really want seem to offer up something that, realistically, they aren't ever going to have. Some say they want to be wealthy, but that's a profoundly subjective goal. Others want to be happy, but…
I haven't written in a while because I have been thinking about the current world situation. From a spiritual perspective, we seem to be in a period of moral bankruptcy stemming from all moral questions being profoundly oversimplified. The cause of that reductionism is neither on the left or the right alone. Rather, it's everywhere.…
Craig Bergland 