Every time someone says "kids these days don't know how to read" I just want to quote a tweet about your reading groups.

I'm still in the stage of home ownership where making my mortgage payments is exciting.

Logan Lucky - George R R Martin demands YouTube video by The Original Mr E

Happy Logan Lucky day! This scene gets funnier every year.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nwa6...

How Not to Be a Schismatic How does a Christian choose where to land in our broken ecclesial landscape?

It's a good companion piece to Jeff Reimer's article which I still think about all the time.
comment.org/how-not-to-b...

This feels very true in practice. There are lots of people in the Churches I have served that are not "radical" and yet remain faithful in their place.
mereorthodoxy.com/kichijiro-wa...

It is way past my bedtime.

I think it was better when rich people didn't have a way to get richer by showing us how rich they are.

Christian Contemporary music exists because of a very strange relationship between American Consumerism and American Christianity. I am not sure other religions have this same kind of blend, so maybe not?

Kirsten Sanders in Mere Orthodoxy mereorthodoxy.com/forsaking-al...

The sound of the dishwasher is a weird generator of focus for me.

Aw, this makes me sad too. Blessings on your morning.

I've been pastoring for almost five years. I still find it much easier to write a sermon than a congregational prayer.

This book is an excellent companion to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's "Life Together" and has been so helpful in naming something I've thought about a lot when considering virtual church.

Yesterday: "Boy, it sure feels like this discussion group is just cycling through the same ideas. I'm not sure what I'm doing here."
Today: "Boy, this discussion group is generating some certified gold."
I am being reminded to be patient and gracious in a variety of spaces.

Had to leave home at 6 this morning, so for once I was grateful that the old dog tried to wake me up at 5.

"Kings may lift up their heads above the clouds, but they, as well as the rest of mankind, are under the government of God; and such being the case, it is in vain for them arrogantly to struggle to obtain exemption from the obligations of reason. Yet this is what they do..." John Calvin on Ps. 82

Sometimes you take a paragraph out of the sermon and suddenly it's much better. That happened today. Now I need a nap.

I keep checking social media at night to discover there are no messages. It's mostly because everyone who is usually posting is here where I am.

"Ben why are there never any people in your pictures?"

I don't like taking pictures of strangers without their permission, and I like to give the impression that I live in a post-apocalyptic world when I share on social media.

More advisory committee meetings this morning. The chair says they may be finished early enough to have a plenary session tonight #crcsynod

Advisory committees are meeting, so the hallways at Redeemer are mostly empty. The campus is pretty beautiful (although most of them are...) #crcsynod

The pink means I get kicked out when we go to executive session. #crcnasynod

This feels an awful lot like a mix of summer camp and the first day of Grade 9 #crcnasynod

...actually nevermind. It seems I can be somewhat persuasive.

Just over here fighting a losing battle against the use of AI in church spaces.

Went to do a wedding for a couple from my previous congregation after five and a half months away. It made me feel a lot of feelings that I wasn't expecting. I don't know how anyone participates in Church life without caring about people.

I'm reading Stanley Hauerwas' "A Community of Character" right now. This paragraph leapt off the page at me yesterday.

Ah, yes that sounds like something that should exist. Someone who is not tired should make that.

Maybe it's because there are so many lies to rebut that none of the questions can be frequently asked.

CRCNA Inside Baseball #7: Neil Postman and Literacy In his 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” Neil Postman tells a story that I think about a lot.

I took a break from writing about the CRCNA and George Lindbeck to writing about the CRCNA and Neil Postman. We might need to teach people to read if we want to function...at all together.
open.substack.com/pub/bengresi...