Life is strange indeed. The way in which God works through different people guiding their lives in various ways is truly amazing. For a little over a month now, my family and I have been attending Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church in Winston-Salem, NC. This is especially remarkable considering my attitude towards religion and Christianity only a few years ago. Five years ago this week, I gave up my career as an aircraft mechanic to attend

Rest is important. This may seem too obvious to need stating, but then again, some of my good friends will be surprised that I put rest and important in the same sentence. My personal sleep practices notwithstanding, the psalmist indicates that rest is part of God’s design for us when he says, “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives

Several weeks ago, on Saturday, a couple of hashtags that expressed admiration for Hitler and his Jewish genocide were trending on Twitter, including #HitlerWasRight and #HitlerDidNothingWrong.1 These expressions are not limited to the internet; they are also being heard in public, with demonstrators in Paris vandalizing property and chanting, “Death to Jews,” and, “Hitler was right.”2 Right now there are many who are upset over Israel’s ground war against Gaza, but in this anger hatred

The newsfeed on Facebook (or any social media) is a troubling place. News of bombed planes, war in Gaza, murdered clergymen, and school shootings have all claimed prominent space over the past couple months as I scroll through my newsfeed. To quite literally add insult to injury, people post and comment on Facebook in a degrading, self-righteous, and outright obnoxious manner. Most people accompany the news of violence in the world with violence in their

At times, I feel within me a burning conviction of the truth of something that is at once more difficult to put into words than the doctrines of my Christian faith yet as clear as crystal to my soul and my seat of “knowing.” When I feel this way, it is time to sit down in front of pen and paper and muddle through until I can capture a solid thought from the elusive world

Ephesians 4:15 “…speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ.” Why is truth so often served within the context of law and justice rather than love? In almost every instance where truth was used in the Old Testament, it was accompanied by love, kindness, justice, mercy, or another expression of who God is. Often truth was revealed as

In my previous post, I discussed the necessity of having a worldview of creation and resurrection to form a coherent vision of social justice, one in which we can be confident our work in the present will come to fruition in the resurrection.  In this article, I want to extend the discussion to the particularities of the Reformed tradition, hoping to see what a Calvinistic worldview has to say about social justice.  I will argue

The rumble of thunder reverberates off the foothills. Damp pine scent laces the air. A trio of squirrels seek refuge in the spruce that touches the sky with its tip-top branches. This is the stillness of the very first Summer Saturday–my day of solitude and sleep, of caramel-filled chocolate and endless mugs of PG Tips. It is a fairy sort of daylight, ripe for reading Phantastes or Lord of the Rings. I can see sunlight slanting

Learning and mastering any new language is an extremely difficult task. Since high school, I have studied a handful of languages including Spanish, Czech, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, and German, though I have mastered none of those. This is, of course, my fault for having a short attention span and not sticking with one long enough to become proficient, yet I have greatly enjoyed the time spent learning each of them. The study of foreign languages