By: Rhonda Davis on February 16, 2020
**First, I apologize for my tardiness to this discussion. All five members of my family are recovering from round three of the flu. I have either been acting as a nurse or patient over the last couple of weeks, and this week got the best of me. I am happy to be back in touch…
By: Nancy VanderRoest on February 15, 2020
Life is all about experiences: some are good, and some are bad. But experiences are what make up our perceptions and perspectives. It is through experiences that our story is told. I have a friend who wrote a powerful book a few years ago. Roxanne became a close friend who unexpectedly passed away recently. But…
By: Digby Wilkinson on February 14, 2020
Jordan Peterson: Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and author of many books – but who cares, what matters is YouTube and controversy. He’s also extremely unwell. Publicly critiquing Jordan Peterson feels like naively leaping into a mixed martial arts fighting ring with Floyd Mayweather or Connor McGregor…
By: Jenn Burnett on February 14, 2020
How much does the motivation for our research impact what we find? How much does the goal of a journey we undertake determine where we will get to? This is both a question that I kept coming back to in this week’s reading as well as a question raised within the reading. Canadian Jordan…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on February 14, 2020
Jordan Bernt Peterson (born June 12, 1962) is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. His main areas of study are abnormal, social, and personality psychology. Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1999), examined several academic fields to describe the structure of systems of beliefs and myths, their role in the regulation of emotion, creation of meaning, and…
By: Mary Mims on February 14, 2020
“The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. Eccles. 1:1-2 (KJV)” These words of King Solomon were written in the book of Ecclesiastes thousands of years ago expressing the frustration of a King, who had great wisdom, great riches,…
By: Tammy Dunahoo on February 14, 2020
There is a proliferation of materials and models in the psychological world in recent years regarding meaning making. The heightened need for humanity to make sense of the events of life we are witnessing and personally experiencing no longer seems to fit neatly inside the box of this technologically advanced society. It’s as if the…
By: Sean Dean on February 13, 2020
In May of 1977 we were introduced to the Star Wars universe and its ragtag group of nobodies whose combined talents (and a bit of luck) would save their universe from the ravages of the Galactic Empire. Within this group was the hero Luke Skywalker, who within the scope of the original three films, would…
By: Karen Rouggly on February 13, 2020
I’ve always loved the creation story. Most cultures of the world begin with a creation story.[1] Any good biblical exegesis should first ask the question as to why an origin story is needed. What do people need to know about how the world came into existence, and what did the author(s) of Genesis really intend…
By: Andrea Lathrop on February 13, 2020
I was excited to read another book by Jordan Peterson. Maps of Meaning was much more challenging than his 12 Rules for Life and certainly shows he has an academic and popular style in his writing repertoire. Peterson is a former Harvard professor and clinical psychologist, among other things. His own relating of his nightmares of…
By: Harry Edwards on February 13, 2020
Jordan Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist and former professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, is an enigma to most Christians. Peterson, author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief rose to stardom after some of his interviews on YouTube went viral.1 The seemingly simple things he suggests for people to adopt to…
By: Rev Jacob Bolton on February 12, 2020
The introduction to this week’s text is laugh out loud funny. YouTube star and author Jordan Peterson describes his early political experience in the liberal socialist party of Canada. Disillusioned with his homelife, and, in particular, his lack of solid answers from the church, Peterson joined the left and socialist leaning political machine looking for…
By: Jer Swigart on February 11, 2020
Before the technologically sophisticated classrooms of today were those of my childhood, the walls of which were adorned with rolled-up maps. Many of these enlarged atlases featured transparent overlays that charted topics such as the history of global discovery, the migration journeys of ancient populations, and the shifting borders of North America. The meticulous mapping…
By: Darcy Hansen on February 11, 2020
It was a warm August morning at the retreat center. I was one of thirty women gathered for a weekend of leadership training and fellowship. We spent hours laughing, learning, and growing in our love for one another and Christ. On Sunday morning, I woke early and went for a two hour walk beside the…
By: Greg Reich on February 11, 2020
As the husband grabs his bible and a cup of coffee he yells out to his wife. “Hurry up honey, we’re going to be late for church!” “Coming!” she responds with her Bible under her arm as she grabs her cup of coffee. “I am looking forward to finishing up this sermon series on the…
By: Shawn Cramer on February 11, 2020
The imagination is a powerful spiritual faculty. It allows humans to evaluate what is and envision what could be. Alternate future realities (what could be) exist only in and because of our prophetic imaginations. Furthermore, imaginations provide individual identity and construct social connection, communities, and orient our spiritual formation. For CS Lewis, the imagination is…
By: Harry Fritzenschaft on February 10, 2020
Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks (born August 19, 1960) is a Canadian-American philosopher. He is a Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University, Illinois. Hicks is the author of four books and a documentary. His Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault argues that postmodernism is best understood as a rhetorical strategy of intellectuals and academics on the far-left of the political…
By: Dylan Branson on February 10, 2020
At the beginning of his dissertation, Evangelicalism and Capitalism, Dr. Jason Clark asks this question: “Has my church, and my Evangelical kin, become captive to a mode of ‘dispensing religious goods and services’ to consuming participants?”[1] Recently I have had several conversations with my housemates about what we have been studying in regards to capitalism…
By: Steve Wingate on February 10, 2020
Dr. Clark’s project provides a critical thesis that “deployed its own ‘map-making method as a kind of heuristic concept map to trace correspondence between church acts and beliefs. This ‘map-making’ ensures that the thesis provides evaluation and resourcing for deployment to current and related Evangelical contexts. Second, the thesis proposes that, contrary to methodological worries…
By: John Muhanji on February 10, 2020
Human life is about history, and every generation has a point of reference from where they have come from and where they are going. It has said several times that if we do not know our history, then we cannot connect from where we are coming from hence the difficulty to focus on where we…
