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Silver Slippers: The Book is Better than the Movie

One of the many luxuries of being able to do a large portion of my jobs from home, is that I get to be an active participant in the daily lives of my family. Recently my wife has started the practice of reading real chapter books aloud to the kids at lunch and before bed. Over the course of the last several months, I’ve had the opportunity of listening to “The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe”, “Because of Winn-Dixie”, and “The Wizard of Oz” read aloud by my wife and experienced for the first time by my children. — Please don’t spoil the end of Winn-Dixie for me. I missed the ending because I had to work and I don’t know if everyone at the party finds him or not. — The current book we’re reading is Oz. There’s no telling how many times I’ve watched that movie. It was in constant rotation in my house growing up. I’d conservatively guess I’ve watched the movie 25 times. But, despite having seen the movie many times, I’ve never once read the book. To be honest, until I married my elementary school librarian wife, I didn’t even know Oz was a book. So, this read-aloud experience has been really cool for me. I’m getting to experience the book of The Wizard of Oz for the first time.

Review: Basis Bibel Auslese

Back in October I launched a German-language worship service in Nashville, Tennessee. In the lead-up to launching St. Mang, I knew I’d need to focus on my German to get back to the point where I could write a sermon in German each month.

I immediately switched to German for my morning prayers using the 1984 Luther translation. Though there is a lot I like about Luther’s translation in German, it is not a great entry point into theological/ecclesial German. I found the language to be a barrier to getting back into German and especially towards my goal of writing simple sermons that native and non-native speakers of German could understand.

God's Self Revelation

As the only source of life and being, God is in a constant state of giving to his creation. Because he wills it, humanity, the earth, and the cosmos are. In this very abstract sense, all things “visible and invisible” are a revelation of the God who creates and sustains them. The enterally triune God, however, is not chiefly a god of the abstract. He is a god of the particular.

The Bible in the Methodist Tradition

The Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church were adopted in 1784 at the founding conference of the former Methodist Episcopal Church. John Wesley, the initiator of the Methodist revival within the Church of England, took the original thirty-nine articles establish by the English church and edited them to make them more concise and removed overly Calvinist language. Wesley compiled his revision of the Anglican thirty-nine articles, now pared down to only twenty-five, into his Sunday Service of the Methodist, a book similar to the common prayer book of the English church. This book of prayer, worship, and instruction was adopted by the Methodist Episcopal Church in America as a founding document. The Articles[1] have remained a binding statement for Methodists throughout many splits, unions, and reunions. As a guiding statement within the Methodist church, conversations around the place of the Hebrew Bible within the church must start there.