By: Chad McSwain on April 5, 2024
“Do you know who painted this paining?” I was asked this as a friend held up my copy of Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. “Salvador Dalí.” I replied. While I knew the artist, I did not know how fitting this cover art truly is for the hardback edition of Tom Holland’s expansive…
By: Julie O'Hara on April 4, 2024
After five days of lying in the dark, something surprising happened. I washed my hands and I noticed how the warm water flowing over my hands and wrist and it was good. I realized I was present in the moment. How long had it been since I experienced being present? I remembered chewing an apple…
By: Daren Jaime on April 4, 2024
I remember being the last person seated and taking my seat at the back of the plane. Exhausted from the conference, I quickly buckled in, began to rest my head against the window, and fell asleep before takeoff. In the midst of my sleep, the flight attendant woke me up and said, I’m sorry, sir,…
By: Todd E Henley on April 4, 2024
Monday, July 12, 2021, my new client showed up to his first session and the first words out of his mouth were, “I heard you can help people heal from the devastating impact of trauma. I am going to tell you things I have never told anyone. After you hear my shitful story, I am…
By: Adam Harris on April 4, 2024
My best friend, who I’ve known since kindergarten, was in the U.S. Marines. If you’ve ever seen the show Reacher, he is a leaner more charismatic version of Alan Ritchson’s character from the show. We attended the same church, went to the same school, and played football together in a “Friday Night Lights” kind of…
By: Debbie Owen on April 4, 2024
I was at a loss. At an impasse, actually. I had read most of David Rock’s Your Brain at Work over the last couple of days. I could see lots of connections to my NPO project. But when it came to starting a blog article with a story about this book I was stuck. When…
By: Ryan Thorson on April 4, 2024
“Slow down, you move too fast You got to make the morning last Just kicking down the cobble stones Looking for fun and feelin’ groovy” (The 59th street by Simon and Garfunkel) One of the reasons I decided to enroll in a doctoral program was because I wanted to learn the discipline of writing. As…
By: Laura Fleetwood on April 4, 2024
On the blog today is my review of the 2023 book, Evangelization and Ideology: How to Understand and Respond to the Political Culture by Dr. Matthew Petrusek, Professor of Catholic Ethics and Assistant Director at the Word on Fire Institute. Petrusek tackles the complex art of arguing against modern ideologies using the principles of Catholic…
By: Nancy Blackman on April 4, 2024
In 2013, I was bedridden for 6 months. Not only did I need to step away from my work as a missionary, I couldn’t do much of anything but lie in bed. The energy needed to sit up was sometimes too difficult. With so much free time, I began to search the internet for answers.…
By: Mathieu Yuill on April 4, 2024
I found Portland Seminary when a classmate from the masters program I attended posted some really interesting thoughts online about an assignment she was working on. I messaged her to find out what she was doing and she told me about the doctor of semiotics she was perusing. She encouraged me to take the same…
By: Sara Taylor Lattimore on April 4, 2024
We all have some level of influence over the circles in which we live and operate. The amount of influence, the impacts of the influence, and the lasting effects of our influence varies and sometimes can’t even be felt in our lifetime but, is discovered when looking back at our history. Dominion The book Dominion…
By: Kim Sanford on April 4, 2024
Then he rose, grenade in hand. He was pulling the fuse. He cocked his arm back to throw— and then he saw me looking at him across my rifle barrel. He stopped. He looked right at me. That’s where the image of his eyes was burned into my brain forever, right over the sights of…
By: Graham English on April 4, 2024
On December 18, 2016, the church that I was pastoring experienced a devastating church fire. The fire department fought valiantly but the building couldn’t be saved. Unfortunately, the fire was caused by a person in the church who was later charged with arson. As a result of the fire, we had to move a congregation…
By: Diane Tuttle on April 4, 2024
For the longest time, I thought multi-tasking was a great way to get lots done in a short time period. I am not sure, exactly, what changed my mind. It might have been the stacks of papers that were left unfiled on my desk or the mountain of work I had yet to do. Regardless…
By: Jenny Steinbrenner Hale on April 3, 2024
In his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland, historian of ancient societies, writes an extensive account of the influence of Christianity on Western Civilization. In Holland’s own words, “This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of…
By: Christy Liner on April 3, 2024
In March I went on a lovely vacation to Japan with my family. I am half-Japanese and my mother’s side of the family lives in Japan. My mother’s conversion to Christ and marriage to my father wasn’t well received from her family, so I didn’t have the opportunity to know my extended family during childhood.…
By: Jenny Dooley on April 3, 2024
I read The Good Kill: Just War and Moral Injury, by Marc LiVecche on my flight to Phnom Penh, Cambodia last week. I then watched We Were Soldiers. I understood the film to be an accurate representation of the impact of war not only to soldiers on both sides of the Vietnam War, but that…
By: Daren Jaime on April 3, 2024
Reading the newspaper was a daily ritual in my household. In fact, we had the news delivered to us daily at our doorstep. Sometimes, my sister would wake up early before work just to get an early jump at the goings-on in the world. My parents were also affixed to the headlines, which would prompt…
By: Chris Blackman on April 3, 2024
The first chapter of this book, “Your Brain at Work,” got my attention. I loved the stage analogy and could relate to it. I have a very large stage in my brain, with way too many actors and a large audience. It is hard to stay focused. I never thought of it as a stage;…
By: Chad Warren on April 3, 2024
“Real men don’t eat quiche” is a phrase from the 1982 book Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche by Bruce Feirstein.[1] The book is a satire of masculine stereotypes. In a clever tongue-in-cheek approach, Feirstein explained what was acceptably “masculine” and “feminine” behavior according to the era’s societal standards. For real men, quiche was, apparently, a…
