When I was in kindergarten, the teacher had us write stories. It was the first time I had ever done such a thing. It was a revelation. A mind-blowing, life-changing moment. Until then, it had never occurred to me that stories had to be written down before they could beContinue Reading
Kids (and kids in church) like to tell stories with weird superstitions and urban legends and dark rumors and wacky conspiracy theories. I remember being highly skeptical of this stuff. It seemed to me that kids were kind of gullible. I didn’t want to be gullible. So if some kidContinue Reading
When I was a kid, church seemed pretty much like school. Adults made me go. People told me stories and showed me pictures. Sometimes they asked questions about the stories they told me, and if they asked questions it was important to tell them the right answer. Church was differentContinue Reading
One of the things I never do anymore is skip church. That used to be one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid. I couldn’t do it on my own — it had to be because my parents had decided we were going to skip church.Continue Reading
The significance of the number 666 comes from Revelation 13:18: This calls for wisdom. If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666. Most scholars believe that this number is a cryptogram for Nero Caesar. This hasn’t stoppedContinue Reading
According to The Christian Century, The Da Vinci Code and the Left Behind series share more than wild marketplace success in spite of dull cardboard characters, poor-to-barely-adequate prose, and a general preposterousness. Both also “trade on a fundamentally gnostic premise: that most of the church has been duped and thatContinue Reading