Tag: christianity
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An Unknown God
Acts 17:22-31 – 5/10/2026 – Sixth Sunday of Easter What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. Acts 17:23 Paul’s appeal to the Athenians to follow Jesus is unlike any of the other recorded words of Paul, either in his epistles or in the book of Acts. Instead of starting from the…
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The Paradox of Presence
John 14:27-29 – 5/9/2026 You heard me say to you, ‘I am going away, and I am coming to you.’ John 14:28 (NRSVue) Jesus is no longer with us in the flesh, as a living, breathing, embodied, in the room, person. We are not in the position of the original disciples. We cannot simply ask…
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Throw Your Excess Overboard
Acts 27:13-38 – 5/8/2026 After they had satisfied their hunger, they lightened the ship by throwing the wheat into the sea. Acts 27:38 (NRSVue) Today’s New Testament Lectionary reading tells of Paul’s perilous sea voyage around the Island of Crete on his way to Rome to stand in judgment before the Emperor. As the ship…
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The Weakness of a God with Regrets
Genesis 6:5-22 – 5/7/2026 The Lord saw that the wickedness of humans was great in the earth and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humans on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. Genesis 6:5-6 (NRSVue) What…
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The Weight of Choice and Knowing how to live
Proverbs 3:5-12 – 5/5/2026 Trust in the Lord with all your heart,and do not rely on your own insight. Proverbs 3:5 (NRSVue) For the Lutheran and indeed for the Christian, we are to rely on God’s will and wisdom as superior and more conducive to flourishing than our own fallen human wisdom. We lack the…
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Dionysus and the Crucified
by Justin Marquis A Nietzsche scholar in seminary, a Christian writing a blog invoking the pagan God of wine; what exactly is going on? Nietzsche himself proposed a dynamic and even violent opposition, expressed as Dionysus versus the Crucified, between the God of wine and Christianity. Dionysus the god of subterranean, sometimes violent urges, the…
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Why Jesus?
by Justin Marquis Last week I was asked by an old friend, “Why Jesus?” regarding my return to a life of faith. This is an unsurprising question given my past rejection of Christianity and the Church. I have attempted to answer this question before, but that answer was just as provisional as this one. What…
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Returning to the Church. Why? What does it mean?
by Justin Marquis I would believe only in a god who could dance….Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me. –Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I, “On Reading and Writing.” I keep starting to begin a blog post explaining my return to the church beginning…
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Escape! How I left Evangelicalism
In my last entry, I wrote that I would post about the three types of reasons I left the evangelical* campus church I attended while in university—intellectual reasons, moral-political reasons, and reasons having to do with sexuality and lifestyle. I’ve decided to forgo that post and go a slightly different direction. You, the reader, can…
Dionysus on a Bike 