Author: JR. Forasteros

All systems are comprised of physical artefacts. As we begin our exploration of systemic racism in America, we investigate the Confederate monuments we’re removing all over the country. How should persons of faith understand this issue, and more importantly: how does that illuminate how the artefacts in our daily lives are racialized too?

We’ve spent the whole summer learning all kinds of tools to read Scripture. But if we approach the Bible with the wrong attitude, we’ll still miss the God to whom the Scripture points. With some help from John and C. S. Lewis., we learn how to read the Bible mythically.

The idea that the Bible contains mythology makes a lot of us uncomfortable. But just like other genres, myth is there on purpose – and vital to our formation as God’s people. So how does myth work, exactly?

Faith doesn’t have to be an esoteric, theoretical thing. In fact, the letters in the Bible present us a window into how the earliest followers of Jesus navigated the complexities of faithfulness in the real world. How can these letters help us navigate our own faithfulness today?

How are the powerless to make their way in the world? Folktales – literally stories of the people – record tricks and traps those with no social or political capital use to shape the world around them. But… why are such stories in the Bible? And can they really form us spiritually? Michelle Reyes takes us into the story of Tamar to explore the tricksters and trickstars who enact Biblical justice – whatever it takes!

We look to books like Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiastes for rules to help us live more godly lives. But these books don’t want to make us smarter. They want to make us more wise. The difference is in how we see the world, and how these books can be guides to us, to help us live as God’s people in even the most complicated situations.

Biblical history doesn’t hold up to our modern standards for history. So how can we trust history in the Bible? And more importantly, how can these stories of ancient peoples and events help us know God better today?

Many of us find poetry to be an impenetrable genre. But the purpose of poetry is to point beyond the limits of language to deep truths of our existence. The Bible is more than a quarter poetry – how does biblical poetry invite us to know the God who is beyond our words about God?