Category: Hospitality
To Give You Mere Hope
C.S. Lewis called us “Mere Christians,” and we are experiencing yet another time in...
Finding Unity and Community
How do we find unity and community amid chaotic diversity? How do we make disciples of all the nations when living in the “Negative World”?
Desperately Seeking Global Community through Film: Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem
We can forge global community amidst the chaos of human evil by finding the similarity in the dilemmas addressed by both the Chinese sci-fi and the British fantasy authors, and applying to Liu’s proposals Tolkien’s timeless insights regarding humanity’s Great Escape from evil.
Tortured Poets, Hard and Soft, Meet Kaleidoscope Jesus: Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, and Lauren Daigle in Conversation
Completing a triumvirate of AUJ reviews of Taylor Swift as she concludes her global Eras tour, she is cast in an imaginary conversation with Christian singer Lauren Daigle as well as the first twenty-first century-born chart-topping vocalist, Billie Eilish.
Understanding Emily: Putting Intellectual Hospitality into Action
The day after our conversation, Emily said to me, “You know, my ex-husband used to say to me all the time, ‘Nobody cares what you think.’” She paused and then added, “Thank you for caring what I think.”
Dining with Alice
Okay. I admit it.
I had a fantasy.
And, it went something like this:
Pride: Deadly to “Mere Christian” Community
Shortly after the Covid pandemic started, I read Pope Francis’s recent social teaching encyclical,...
The Oak on the Town Green
Yet they’d let the venerable oak in the center square, past which half the townsfolk walked any given day of the week, get so wracked and choked with saplings and briar that a Woodshirk had appeared in it.
This was a disaster.
The Unity of Charity: C.S. Lewis and the End of Ecumenism
C.S. Lewis was no ecumenist in the formal sense of the word.
A Little Death
Blood’s fever raids my mind,
chains my will; and raging
unrestrained, my body
grasps control of yours and
yields us to the wilding
whirlwind rushing our skin.
The Heart of Clara Robinson (and Other Discoveries)
It is not just a matter of wanting your ego stroked (though none of us is pure enough to be completely free of that need). Your very heart’s blood was the ink in which those poems were written, after all.
Listening as Intellectual Hospitality
Listening requires us to adopt a posture of humility and a willingness to learn from those we converse with.
The Real Reason You Don’t Have Friends (and How to Fix It)
I remember how much it hurt seeing that Facebook picture. All of their smiling faces. And I wasn’t invited. We all had met and gone out together that same night we all had our first adventure. But somehow, when it came time to have our next adventure, I was left behind.
With All Humility and Gentleness
We can contribute to the problem or we can choose to listen and purposefully engage in conversation — sharing the gift of what C.S. Lewis calls “intellectual hospitality.”
Loving Our Unequally Yoked Neighbors
Community is a fundamental human need. In the Garden of Eden, God declared, “It is not good...
The Chosen’s More than Mere Christian Jesus
Jenkins and his crew achieve the right kind of diversity by remembering that the gospels are set in the Middle East during the Roman Empire when Jerusalem marked a crossroad between Europe, Asia, and Africa: think of Pentecost, when the gospel went out on a day when there “were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven.”
A Review of I Beg to Differ
She said she thought he was a prophet, an amazing man of faith, but merely human and not God in the flesh. At that point, the conversation went south.
