By: Jonita Fair-Payton on April 2, 2024
This past week has been so peaceful and filled with so many joyful interactions. I love Holy Week; it is my favorite time of the year with Thanksgiving being a close second. I welcomed the week off from class, readings, and posts as I desperately needed the week to not be on a schedule. I…
By: John Fehlen on April 1, 2024
Remember back to when the “internet” first became a thing? We had AOL and the famed “You Got Mail” voice prompt.[1] MSN Messenger and Yahoo were kind of a big deal. Viral videos were just becoming something we talked about and shared via email on the internet; both things that in 1994 the hosts of…
By: Travis Vaughn on April 1, 2024
I read Marc Livecche’s book,The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury, with a friend and my dad in mind, wondering how they might experience this book. My friend Doug is a DMin graduate of George Fox. His recommendation of the school was one of the factors I considered when I explored doctoral programs a…
By: Jennifer Vernam on April 1, 2024
As we head into the 2024 election season, public attitudes towards our military efforts in Israel and Ukraine are relevant. In The Good Kill,[1] Marc LiVecche refutes a common understanding that all killing is wrong, all the time. As a research fellow at the National War College and recognized expert in ethics[2], LiVecche is trying…
By: Jonita Fair-Payton on March 28, 2024
“Baptism is the dramatic or episodic representation of the act or ritual of initiation-or, at least, stands midway between the entirely “unconscious” or procedural forms of initiation and their semantically abstracted symbolic equivalents. Baptism is the spiritual birth(rebirth) as opposed to birth of the flesh.”[1] I preached last month on Renewal, and as I…
By: Kim Sanford on March 27, 2024
I know we’ve often been advised to not only read the books we’re assigned but also read about the books we’re assigned. That is, we’re meant to read reviews and the like, but I can’t say I always do. This week, though, for whatever reason I decided to start with some reviews of Jordan Peterson’s…
By: Russell Chun on March 25, 2024
قبل ما تنطوي الصفحة” (qabl ma tantawi as-safha) – Before the page turns (Iraqi Arabic). Flashback Part 1 Peering into the topic Part 2 What others are saying Epilogue Flashback She’s dead. Dimitri repeated, “she’s dead.” Dimi a soldier from Ukraine spoke without feeling, his face frozen. I remember him teasing Nahla a few…
By: Dinka Utomo on March 23, 2024
And even if you’re a rationalist, say, and a cynic and a nihilist, and you say, well, nothing has any meaning, you still run into the problem of pain. Because pain undercuts your arguments and has a meaning. So there’s no escaping from the meaning, you can pretty much demolish all the positive parts of…
By: Cathy Glei on March 22, 2024
When I think about following Jesus, the word that encompasses my pursuit of Him as an apprenticeship. Apprenticeship is a method of training and on-the-job experience, developing a new generation of practitioners, often accompanied by some study and/or shared learning. Much of the training is done while working alongside an employer or instructor, who helps…
By: Jana Dluehosh on March 21, 2024
Here I come, you ready for it, I’m going to stretch myself here and go off my topic…Okay, no I am not, I’m going to talk about the meaning of suffering. Why not? I work right in the middle of it and it’s the human condition. Jordan B. Peterson is a psychologist who wrote a…
By: Todd E Henley on March 21, 2024
“Critical thinkers have an abiding interest in the problematic aspects of their own thinking, and they seek out these problem areas, target them, and change something about their thinking in order to reason more rationally, logically, and justifiably.”1 Thanks to this program and blogging every week, I am slowly, painfully, and finally learning how to…
By: Adam Harris on March 21, 2024
“In Judaism, we take a strong view on this, and we have now for 2,000 years and we say reading the Bible literally is heresy”.[i] This surprising statement was made by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, an orthodox chief Rabbi from the United Kingdom, in a lively debate with one of the most famous atheist and Evolutionary…
By: Jenny Dooley on March 21, 2024
I want to know Christ — yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death. Philippians 3:10 NIV I approached Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson with anticipation and a weary brain. The academic writing style was dense and certain…
By: Mathieu Yuill on March 21, 2024
Navigating through Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief feels akin to embarking on a dense archaeological dig, where instead of unearthing fossils you’re discovering facets of human belief, through the unveiling of mythology, religion, and psychology. Peterson’s This book isn’t merely academic; it’s a deep dive into the collective human psyche, exploring…
By: Scott Dickie on March 20, 2024
If you have read and digested Jordan Peterson’s somewhat recent offering, 12 Rules for Life (1), you might have picked up his much earlier work, Maps of Meaning (2), and expected to plow through it somewhat quickly and easily. If you had such a presumption, you would recognize your error around page three. Maps of…
By: Kally Elliott on March 20, 2024
My twenty-one-year-old son is agnostic. Or atheist. Or something else. He is not a Christian. Of that he is sure, but, if I understand him correctly, he doesn’t find religion relevant enough to his life to be defined by a specific belief or religious system. This young adult was baptized, raised and confirmed in the…
By: Pam Lau on March 19, 2024
The first time I heard the name Jordan Peterson was in 2018. Sitting in the back two rows of my Fall 2018 communication courses was a group of young men between the ages of 22-30 who found themselves enrolled in college after time serving in the military. Several weeks into listening to their responses to…
By: Russell Chun on March 19, 2024
Ztracen ve tmě. Lost in the dark – Czech Flashback Part 1 What my peers are saying Part 2 What Peterson taught me. Epilogue – New Map/Old Map Flashback Scene #1 – Steelpot jammed on his head, flashlight in hand – fighting the dark, wind threatening to rip the map from his hands, the 2LT…
By: Esther Edwards on March 19, 2024
“Meaning is the most profound manifestation of instinct.”[1] One of the most inspiring stories of human resilience was that of Victor Frankl. Dr. Frankl wrote a detailed account of his life as a prisoner in the Nazi death camps where he lost his beloved wife, mother, father, and brother. Out of his loss and the…
By: John Fehlen on March 19, 2024
“Something we cannot see protects us from something we do not understand.” Jordan Peterson in Maps of Meaning When I read the opening sentence of Map of Meaning I instantly knew we were in for a doozy of a book. I’m somewhat familiar with Peterson’s more current writings, social media posts, podcasts, blogs, and YouTube…
