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Love, All Around
Christmas Eve always makes me feel a bit emotional. Quiet emerges from deep in my soul. My heart wants to draw near to the Source of Peace. During a season of hustle, I long for stillness and the feeling get stronger as I get older. It is more than sentimentality. It is a call to something primordial, something that existed before human minds fashioned...
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The Case for Spiritual Anarchism
This is going to seem radical. (It should.) We are now standing at a door of opportunity: it is time for us to unlearn everything the church taught us. “Church” – the Sunday morning service, the weekly Bible study, the choir or worship band, the traditions and expectations – is a crutch and sorry replacement for spirit living. The church, as an institution of...
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Finding God in a Season of Struggle
What we are experiencing is, for many of us, a once-in-a-lifetime defining season of change. A health pandemic reached the doorstep of the United States and barged right in. We Americans are used to watching scares such as this play out in other countries, while we apathetically take it in through the twenty-four hour news cycle. Protests and riots over police brutality are happening...
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Best Practices for Teaching Online Coursework: 15 Suggestions, or What to Do When You Suddenly Find Yourself Teaching Online
An extended family member, who is also in academe, brought it to my attention that many in our field are thinking of the future state of the college classroom. It was only a matter of time before those of us who work in higher education would need to consider alternative methods of teaching. Measures to halt the spread of COVID-19 may begin to impact...
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Looking Up as a Radical Act of Belief
If a person is lucky, she receives a gift that is not only creative and thoughtful, but is life-altering. You know the kind I mean: the book that stops you in your tracks and changes your worldview, the pair of socks that causes you to rethink your relationship to footwear, the mug that brings a smile to your face every morning. Even the simplest...
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On Finding God Outside of the Church This Holiday Season
In America, a common quip around the holidays is, “Jesus is the reason for the season.” The assumption is that the primary focus of the [Christian] holiday should be belief, not consumerism. Though a bright one-liner, like other Chrisitan-isms, it falls flat and without meaning to most ears. It actually contains a lot of meaning, but none of the intended. Something about it does...
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Oak Tree Notebook 