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I was prepared to launch into the story of how we, our Christian society, got here in this hyper-spiritual age. However, I think I need to provide a bit more explanation first. I have been writing about the problem I see of the dwindling Church in America. My own church denomination, Presbyterian USA, had 3.1…
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I want to speak truth to power. I turn 71 tomorrow, which feels unbelievable. Not only because the time has flown, but because I wasn’t supposed to live to 65. When I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma with associated renal failure, at age 63, my particular type of myeloma had a life expectancy of 11…
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An Introduction Wasn’t it Leonard Cohen who said there is a crack in everything… that’s how the light gets in? It was 1990 that I found the crack in the Christian religion. It wasn’t deliberate—the searching, I mean. It came, by the way that fractures always do… a hard blow. I will be clear once…
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Introduction There are two issues that motivate me to keep writing. The Christian church is on a steep decline. While surveys, such as those from Pew Research and Gallup, capture this downward trend, they are only scratching the surface. I believe that Ryan Burge‘s graphs and data pierce that surface. He is a professor of practice…
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I’ve decided for now to leave the issue of cancer. I have learned that if you speak of your own cancer, the attention span is short, before it is assumed that you are just feeling sorry for yourself. This is especially true in religious circles. That stigma, ironically, is one of the cultural traits that…
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This is part of an unedited chapter from the book I am working on. Since the last time I shared a somewhat narcissistic story, which some people might read as “how people wronged me,” I want to stay away from that theme by looking at the caregiver. I also wanted to end my postings about…
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I will do one or two more postings about my myeloma, and then I will move on. I am doing well right now, and it gives me the space to live in denial, so I would rather not talk about those darkest of days. If you have not read the previous post, please go back…
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Again, for the sake of space, I am not just copying and posting from my work in progress, my book, but summaries from chapters. This is part I; I will complete this thought next time in part II. In cosmology, there is a phenomenon called gravitational lensing. It is where there is a large concentration…
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This is not a word-for-word excerpt but more of a summary of a chapter. Whether or not you say “damn” when you stub your toe is trivial, even silly on the surface, but it has a complex history and even philosophical implications. I grew up in the Bible Belt of Tennessee’s Appalachian landscape. A sociology…
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I’m trying to stop writing from a negative perspective. By sounding negative, I am engaging in hypocrisy, as in my real life, I am in my best years. I am profoundly thankful that my awful cancer is at bay and my life is 80% normal. But sometimes something moves me, positive or negative, that haunts…