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  What type of man was Boaz before he met Ruth? He was ruthless.

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  Parents should not feel bad about having kids. There's a worry that the earth is over-populated and all the resources will be consumed. Yes, that could happen. But it depends on what we're teaching our children. People who are raised to be "consumers" will consume resources and take more than they give back to the earth. They create waste and perpetuate exploitative systems. But God created humans to be stewards and caretakers. "Tend the garden," is what God told Ad...

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  Before he faced his passion, Jesus warned his disciples that they would all fall away. He told Peter that he would fall away, but that he had prayed for Peter that he would come back and be strengthened. The author of the Book of Hebrews says that Jesus intercedes for us continually. This makes me wonder that perhaps Jesus was praying for Job during his trial, many thousands of years ago. Even as he allowed Satan to afflict him, Jesus prayed that Job would pass through the test. This is en...

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  There are a few places in the Old Testament where it talks about people living under their own vine and fig. The notable thing about this image is that people are owners and not renters or tenants. The Torah had a provision where every 50 years, land bought and sold would return to its ancestral owners. One of the effects of this law was that there would not be rentier and tenant classes in Israel and that the means of production in that agricultural society would not be concentrated in the ha...

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  Kao soy, northern Thai noodles, today for lunch after church

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  Sooooo ... Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist and famous atheist author of the book The God Delusion, thinks that their chatbot is conscious and treats it as an intelligent friend. 🙄 https://mastodon.social/@mattsheffield/116500991239336079

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  I'm very thankful that several long-standing prayers have been answered in the past couple weeks for three different people. One person got their green card and two others got jobs after long stints of unemployment/under-employment.

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  This is great! "Gen Z Christians attend church more often than millennials, Gen X and baby boomers, according to the Barna Group, a firm that studies U.S. faith trends. In 2025, the typical Gen Z churchgoer attended nearly two weekends a month, the highest level since the firm began tracking, and up from around one weekend a month in 2020. Young men in particular are more interested in faith. A Gallup poll released in April found that in 2025, 42% of young men said religion is very i...

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  I remember reading the Shepherd of Hermas. It's a good book, but I'm glad it's not canon. It's super hardcore when it comes to zero-tolerance for sin. I'm not against that because it's wrong (it's not wrong), just that I can't possibly bear the weight of it. Like the hero of Pilgrim's Progress who is carrying his burden at the beginning of the book. Still, I sometimes wonder at the current zeitgeist in the church. When will we (me) take personal holiness mor...

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  The ideal state of the world is where swords have been beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks because there's nothing else to use them for. But the reality is that we live with the consequences of human sin and evil where the lamb is definitely not safe lying down with a lion. It's with this view that I can say that the hardline Islamic regime that has undemocratically and ruthlessly ruled Iran for the past 40 years is getting just deserts. This doesn't...

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  Paul told Timothy to fan the flame … but it’s easier with a leaf blower

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  Most Christians are aware of C.S. Lewis and a fortunate subset have actually read one or a few of his works, perhaps The Chronicles of Narnia or Mere Christianity or The Screwtape Letters. His signature appeal is a capacity to describe experiences outside of our natural world. A drab grey town that’s infinitesimally small and diminishing but ever growing at the same time, where Napoleon lives by himself in an ever-more remote mansion, pacing about and ranting against his enemies. A quiet green w...

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  “I defy the pope and all his laws, and if God spare my life ere many years, I will cause a boy that driveth the plow, shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.” ~ William Tyndale The first English bible was smuggled into England on this day (March 26) in 1526—500 years ago!

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  Which world’s richest man does this bring to mind? C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, describing an antagonist, Dr. Weston: He was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of "scientifiction,” in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe....