DLGP

Doctor of Leadership in Global Perspectives: Crafting Ministry in an Interconnected World

Category: Uncategorized

Solutions for Good Religion?

By: on March 15, 2017

As I read through the pages of “Bad Religion”, a comment from our last chat haunted my thoughts. It was remarked how we as Christians can stand back and criticize without really making significant world changes. Ironically, this seemed to sum up “Bad Religion”, where the author lived up to his title. He seemed bent…

12 responses

Midcentury Christian Renaissance: a model for today?

By: on March 15, 2017

Ahh, where to begin in my exploration of Bad Religion? Perhaps in introducing a comparison between Ross Douthat’s text and James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World. Hunter introduced us to ways American Christians engage the world from the left (“relevance to the culture”), right (“defensive against”) and neo-Anabaptist.[1] Whereas Hunter introduces three (really, two)…

8 responses

Making Bad Religion Holy Again

By: on March 15, 2017

Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’  Martin Luther King.       For the last few weeks we have been discussing ways to change our culture. If we accept that “To be Christian is to be obliged to engage the world, pursuing God’s restorative purposes over all of…

5 responses

I Want To Be a Power Lifter

By: on March 15, 2017

In God, Sex, and Gender Adrian Thatcher covers a number of topics under the enormous umbrella of God, Sex, and Gender. He discusses “desire” in general and how it pertains to our sexuality and our desire for God. “You may have just agreed with me that desire has an object.” [1] Following Taylor and Luhrmann,…

11 responses

How do I know?

By: on March 11, 2017

One day a psychological anthropologist from Stanford University shows up at your church with a brilliant idea. She wants to spend two years attending your services and participating in your small groups in order to better understand how people experience their Christian faith. She attends Bible classes, church retreats, and everything that can help her…

14 responses

Does God Still Speak?

By: on March 10, 2017

All leading to this thought, Does God still speak? How? God speaks through thoughts and we must learn to discern between our thoughts and His thoughts.  The authors wrote about developing a “new theory of mind.”[2]  This concept of hearing things that are perceived is a very clinical perspective of how God speaks.  Learning to…

10 responses

How a Trip to England Gave Me More Than an Education

By: on March 10, 2017

    Anticipation. Excitement. Trepidation. Anxiety. These are a few of the things I felt when I boarded the plane headed to London to join my cohort of 10, two previous cohorts, professors, administrators, and our lead mentor for the Doctor of Ministry in Leadership and Global Perspectives England Advance 2016. That’s a huge title,…

4 responses

How Many Times Have I Been Asked?

By: on March 10, 2017

As a pastor with a Pentecostal persuasion, I cannot tell you how many times I get asked the question, does God speak to us today?  I have been asked in a variety of different ways.  Whether it is being asked the question directly or when people ask me to speak in tongues on command, people…

13 responses

The power is in us collectively

By: on March 9, 2017

“The big deal is we think the power is in us individually the power is in us collectively. It is in the church.” John M. Perkins [1] It appears that in our current American culture the church is divided. We are either siding with the “conservative right” or the “progressive left”. Depending on how one views…

7 responses

Persistence is Futile?

By: on March 9, 2017

About 50 times each week, I ask myself what the heck was I thinking when I gave up my career to go back to school. I mean, I know I did it out of a sense of calling and purpose, but can one middle-aged woman really make a difference in the world? After reading the…

15 responses

To Hear or Not to Hear and To Be or Not to Be; That is the Question

By: on March 9, 2017

Introduction Tanya Luhrmann’s work, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, is one woman’s perspective and premise on, “How can sensible, educated people in an invisible being who has a real effect on their lives?”[1]  My first objection is her broad use of the “American Evangelical” Church when her reality her…

12 responses

But Are WE Crazy?

By: on March 9, 2017

When God Talks Back, Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God by T.M. Luhrmann is a compilation of stories, interviews, scientific data and research gathered and assembled from people of all walks of life and backgrounds. The pages are the result and assimilation of Luhrmann who is a an accomplished author and award winning psychological…

8 responses

Doctor Doctor Give Me the News

By: on March 9, 2017

Tanya Luhrmann shows how the Vineyard is attempting to create social imaginaries to break out of Charles Taylor’s immanent frame that was created as the secular solution to the problem of how humanity 500 years ago started the transition from not making sense of the world without talking about God and arrived at our current…

8 responses

The Deists’ Guide to the Galaxy

By: on March 9, 2017

  Hunter, James Davison. To change the world: the irony, tragedy, and possibility of Christianity today. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.   To Change the World was a well-written text authored by an accomplished sociologist James David Hunter from the University of Virginia.  The ironically titled book is a critique of modern Christianity’s assumption…

10 responses

Counterpoint

By: on March 9, 2017

It is as if a secularist, who’s “immanence” world view can’t allow for the possibility of transcendence is trying to figure out how people claim a personal communication with the invisible Being who is transcendent. As such this books stands as a counterpoint to Taylor’s A Secular Age. [1] When God Talks Back: Understanding the…

10 responses

ABIDE IN THE PRESENCE OF GOD

By: on March 9, 2017

Tanya Marie Luhrmann—When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God Introduction In his book, A Secular Age, the philosopher Charles Taylor’s investigation seeks to answer the question, How did we become a society “in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the…

13 responses

Okay, I’ll Give You and C- for Trying!

By: on March 9, 2017

Hunter, James Davison. To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Summary: One way to state Hunter’s thesis is in the form of a report card for the American church. The professor has given the American church an A+ on impacting…

18 responses

I’d rather change the world than change a nappy (diaper)

By: on March 9, 2017

To change the world – James Davison Hunter   “I would suggest that a theology of faithful presence first calls Christians to attend to the people and places that they experience directly….the call of faithful presence gives priority to what is right in front of us-the community, the neighbourhood, and the city, and the people…

12 responses