Happy weekend, dear readers! Here is a round-up of different religion, theology, and current events articles from our own authors and across the internet. The following articles do not necessarily reflect the views or mission of Conciliar Post. These articles have been selected based on their prevalence across popular blogs and social media and their relevance to current events. We invite you to engage in friendly and positive discussion about these articles. If you read

There are few times in history so important and yet so obscure as the years following the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, when the movement bearing his name transformed from a band of several dozen followers hiding in terror into an international community that would shape the subsequent history of the world. Despite the paucity of evidence from this period, historians and theologians alike continually return to the earliest years of the Jesus

Irrational Contradiction, or Divine Mystery? The Incarnation is a puzzle, and puzzles are either a lot of fun or a major problem. The puzzle goes like this: Since God created space, time, and humanity, God could exist without space, without time, and without humans. But in the Incarnation, God becomes a temporal, spatial human. How can one thing be both spatial and non-spatial, both temporal and non-temporal, both human and non-human? While Christians often respond,

Exhaustion is the best word for it, I think. For several days, I’d been up day and night, sleeping no more than a couple hours at a time, watching over the stray seven-week-old puppy my wife found wandering the Indian Health clinic’s parking lot. The pup was what we call a “rez dog,” one of the innumerable feral mutts that rove the town of Warm Springs, the center of the reservation of the same name.

In the last article in this series, we attempted to give an introduction and summary of the Mormon worldview through the doctrine of “eternal progression,” the age-long process through which we all move from intelligences to spirit children to mortal bodies to exalted Godhood in eternal marriage. It is within this final stage of eternal progression that we will be camping out in for a while, seeking to understand how “celestial marriage” functions within Mormon

Happy weekend, dear readers! Here is a round-up of different religion, theology, and current events articles from our own authors and across the internet. The following articles do not necessarily reflect the views or mission of Conciliar Post. These articles have been selected based on their prevalence across popular blogs and social media and their relevance to current events. We invite you to engage in friendly and positive discussion about these articles. If you read

Most people want to know the future. What is coming next? Will I be successful? Will my dreams come true? In charismatic circles of Christianity, some look to the gift of prophecy for answers to these questions. Like Pharaoh, or Nebuchadnezzar, they search for a Joseph or a Daniel to listen to the voice of God and then pull back the windows of time to reveal what has not yet taken place. Occasionally, certain Christians

If I ever need a reminder to be careful about my pretensions to sophistication, I can always fall back on my love of country music. Every so often though, even this guilty pleasure comes to good account. Case in point, Keith Urban’s Days Go By. Urban’s song wrestles with the same aspect of time considered in my last article, namely the way time seems to fly. In turn, he suggests a specific view for approaching

There’s a scene in one of my favorite movies, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” that stands for me as a metaphor for my vocation. In this scene, Walter, who works in film development at Life Magazine, laments the loss of a film strip for the final cover of the magazine. The photographer is halfway across the world, while Walter faces the end of his job in New York. Then, imagining a picture of the

Happy weekend, dear readers! Here is a round-up of different religion, theology, and current events articles from our own authors and across the internet. The following articles do not necessarily reflect the views or mission of Conciliar Post. These articles have been selected based on their prevalence across popular blogs and social media and their relevance to current events. We invite you to engage in friendly and positive discussion about these articles. If you read

“What kind of being is God? Does any man or woman know? Have any of you seen Him, heard Him, or communed with Him? Here is the question that will, peradventure, from this time henceforth occupy your attention.”1 Thus begins the King Follett Discourse, one of the most famous sermons delivered by Joseph Smith, the Prophet and first president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Over the course of this article and

Conciliar Post Laura Norris, “The Big Bang and Christianity” Kenneth O’Shaughnessy, “The Seven Words of Creation” Kathryn Dubs, “Waterfall Moments” Jeff Reid, “Time’s End” Joseph Green, “Cosmic Communion: The Role of Creation in Our Journey with Christ (Part 1)” Chris Smith, “Houston, We Have a (Muslim) Problem” Johanna Byrkett, “A Chalice Remade” Guest Author, “The Hidden Drama of Late Winter” From Our Authors Jacob Prahlow, Pursuing Veritas, “American Christianity and the Hell of Paradise Lost”  Johanna Byrkett, Ancient

Well-worn, chestnut-coloured floorboards creak beneath the many feet entering the hushed room. A reverent quiet is—mostly—kept, it is a time of preparation for the special yearly observance. My friend and I arrive early, a rarity for me, to settle our hearts and minds for the Ash Wednesday service. Yet my mind is awhirl, reflecting on the day’s conversations, expectations, frustrations, and disappointments. In spite of outward tranquility, my thoughts are uneasy. Without sound or ceremony,

For years I’ve dreaded February as one of the hardest months of the year. Maybe it’s because Christmas cheer is by now a distant fog, or because the weather acts like a hard-bitten old man. Maybe it’s because of inner maladies—winter blues and the like. February was my personal season of spiritual crisis for some time. I recently learned that early February is part of the liturgical season of Epiphany. Not having grown up paying

As a new contributor for Conciliar Post, it seemed proper that this opening article deal with a topic that is less distinctive to certain traditions and more centered towards the core of the fundamentally and uniquely Christian approach to God and how we as creatures relate with him. The Scriptures time and again reign us back to that central reality of the ultimate purpose permeating everything we are doing as Christians: the infinite and totally

Time is fascinating. Paradoxically, it both moves quickly and slowly, there is plenty of it and yet never enough. Embracing both of these realities is needed to live well. On the one hand, we need keep our focus on the end toward which time is headed if we’re to live well. At the same time, this focus should drive us back the present moment and the direction that has been given for the moment to

It is a fallacy of the modern mind to divide science and religion. It is not only atheists who do this; the average American Christian compartmentalizes theology and science. Holding to a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, many Christians reject scientific theories of evolution and the creation of the universe. While the upcoming Round Table on this blog will discuss creationism and evolution, I wish to address in today’s post the relationship between

Happy weekend, dear readers! Here is a round-up of different religion, theology, and current events articles from our own authors and across the internet. The following articles do not necessarily reflect the views or mission of Conciliar Post. These articles have been selected based on their prevalence across popular blogs and social media and their relevance to current events. We invite you to engage in friendly and positive discussion about these articles. If you read

“When the thinker thinks rightly, he follows God step by step; he does not follow his own vain fallacy.”1 Studying the Middle Ages is a complex process, not only for the plethora of information one must process in order to have a halfway-informed perspective into the period, but also for the multitude of ways in which contemporary—modern and postmodern—attitudes that illuminate Christian opinions of this important period of Christian history. One need look no further

What practices, beliefs, and people qualify as Christian? How broad is the umbrella of Christianity? How might orthodox Christians learn from, even submit to, the wisdom of deviant “Christian” traditions? Within a new series of articles, what I’m calling “Sects Positions,” I’m going to examine these questions while looking at the beliefs of the fringes of Christianity, groups that many would not consider true Christians. In particular, I will be engaging with the Jehovah’s Witnesses