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The Religious Leaders and the God-Man
What would you do if someone told you they were God? If you weren’t religious, you’d probably think they were crazy and laugh. But if you were religious, you’d likely be offended and appalled. The religious leaders were looking for any reason they could to kill Jesus and stop his movement. It didn’t matter that…
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National Trauma and the Jesus Ethic
Trauma has a way of trickling down into our psyche and shading the world we see with dull colors. Even if we haven’t had anything overly traumatic happen to us specifically, we still find ourselves born into a world of trauma and carry it in our various national, ethnic, and socio-economic identities. As scholar Shelly…
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AI Draws Art for My Fiction
I published one novel a few years back called “The Rise of the Water Kingdom.” Today I ran a few of its scenes through an AI art generator called MidJourney to get these depictions created. More info on the book below: Angels and demons. Zombies and ghosts. Water serpents and cyborg dragons. Heaven and Hell.…
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Holy Holy Homeless
This morning I had a dream that there was a woman leading Revelation Song with a blanket over the top half of her body with someone else’s legs sticking out the bottom of the blanket. This looked about as strange as you might imagine. I tried to comprehend what I was looking at as she…
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Jesus Has Been There, Too
It was the night that everything crumbled. Jesus had lost plenty of disciples in ministry before, but he hadn’t lost the twelve. They were both his team and his friends, and they had been through every struggle together. But they wouldn’t stay together for this one. Not this time. When the guards came to arrest…
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Brennan Manning, Evan Hansen, and Jesus
There are special moments in our lives where God speaks into us in such a surreal way that it can’t be ignored. One of my favorite authors, Brennan Manning, had such an experience and writes about it in his memoir. For three hours I found myself in terra incognita. It was the very heart of…
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Eating with Judas
Jesus had eaten with plenty of naysayers and people who meant him harm over the years, but his meal with Judas must have felt extra special. After all, Judas had been elevated to take on the position of one of his twelve closest friends and disciples. He carried a deep privilege and was about as…
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Jesus Sits in Our Stigma
In an often overlooked statement, we find Jesus hanging out at “Simon the leper’s” house. This isn’t explained further so we’re left trying to figure out the scenario. In our time we call Hansens disease “leprosy,” but in ancient times the term leprosy was applicable to many skin diseases. Regardless of what kind of leprosy…
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We All Know Good Works Are Important
We can all agree that we are saved by our faith in Jesus and that none of us can save ourselves. This is good, solid, basic, orthodox theology. In this sense, salvation is by faith alone. But we also all agree that works are important to salvation too—we just don’t like phrasing it that way,…
Jamin Bradley 