The idea of a cognitive castle may be one of the strongest metaphors for life’s journey. It suggests that the mind is not a single room containing a collection of beliefs. It is an architecture constructed over a lifetime. Some rooms were furnished by family before we were old enough to choose the furniture. Others…

Over the last several years, I have encountered ideas that, once put in motion, began something I never really anticipated. They caused me to re-examine what I had come to believe about life, God, myself, and what it all means. Fortunately that is what ideas do when we actually allow them to work on us.…

It’s interesting to think about how something as simple as a relationship with God can gradually become something very different. Perhaps it begins with an experience. Someone encounters something they understand as Divine—a moment of profound awareness, a sense of presence, an answer to a question, an inner knowing, an experience that changes the way…

The gospel appears, historically, less like a single message delivered in finished form and more like an amalgamation of beliefs, memories, experiences, interpretations, and ideas that gradually gathered around Jesus and the communities that followed him. What we now call “the gospel” was not initially a neatly packaged theological system. It emerged within a Jewish…

There’s something interesting hidden in the word theology itself. Literally, it means the study or discourse about God. And perhaps the word tells us something about the philosophical shift that took place over time. What may have begun as a relationship with the Divine—an experience of presence, mystery, encounter, and participation—gradually became something to be…

It is interesting to me how each of us packages the information we have about life. We don’t start with a blank page. (\Some say we do \- either way…\) We arrive in a particular family, culture, time, and place. Then life starts adding information. What our parents tell us. What we experience. What happens…

I’ve been thinking about love lately, and I wonder if we’ve made the category of love too small. We usually recognize love by how it feels. Love feels warm, comforting, accepting, intimate, safe. And certainly those things can be love. But if All-that-is is love, then what do we do with the parts of life…

For the sack of mental curiosity, think about life as a kind of Petri dish experience. We are placed into an environment and then we see what happens. The interesting part is that the environment itself may have a lot to do with the outcome. Put the same organism into different conditions and you can…

The Tower of Babel presents an intriguing problem when the narrative is read as a literal account rather than as an ancient theological story. Humanity is portrayed as unified, constructing a city and a tower “whose top” reaches toward heaven. The Divine then comes down to observe what humanity is doing and concludes that, because…

Give some thought to this idea: the ego may not create a false self so much as assemble a fragmented self from what happened to us. Experiences that were overwhelming, painful, or simply too complex to integrate can become compartmentalized. We learn to put certain memories, emotions, fears, and identities into separate rooms of the…