Why the John 3:16 “Rainbow Man” Is Serving Multiple Life Sentences
We all expect to have important, dramatic lives. We all think we’ll turn out to be heroes. We’re just like Rainbow Man.
The Church Father Who Cut off His Junk
Jesus’ solution to your own sinful tendencies isn’t presented as inconveniencing, insulting, or harming the people around you—it’s presented as handicapping yourself.
The Christian Rock Star Who Put Out a Hit on His Wife
I like to think that, centuries from now, “Christian rock music” will be thought of as yet another inexplicable oddity of Church history, alongside Origen’s self-mutilation, the Crusades, and whatever it is with Lutherans and Jell-O.
The Only Reason You Drink Coffee Is Because 400 Years Ago a Pope Baptized Some Beans
Coffee culture is weird, you guys.
The Ladder That Pretty Much Only Jesus Can Move
Christianity was unusually unified at the time the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built, but things have been falling apart (literally and figuratively) ever since then.
The Guy Who Just Decided He Was Pope
If you’re wondering how someone can just declare himself pope, keep in mind that things in the church were way less formal back then.
The History of Pews Is Just as Terrible and Embarrassing as You’d Imagine
Despite the advent of stadium-style seating and auditorium-like worship halls, the simple, ancient pew endures.
That Time the Church Had One Pope, and Then Two Popes, and Then Three Popes
With multiple popes in play, the people could freely listen to whichever pope was convenient for them at the time, sort of like national church-shopping.
Our Family Narrative: Why Christians Should Study Church History
In college, when I was wrestling the most, my faith was strengthened by one thing: history.
Yuletide Intimations of Hope, Untarnished by Our Foibles
In all these Christmas symbols and practices, in all their manifestations and iterations and alterations, we see humanity’s earnest, finite attempts to express the ineffable.
God and Country: Echoes of the Church in American Music
Popular music generally and Americana in particular are full of Christian relics—images, sounds, and pictures that innately yearn for their spiritual fulfillment.
