The Burning Word

This whole series on James I’ve been wrestling with this question. “But what about the person who is disillusioned with this whole thing?” I know, I know, such a response feels a little burned out. I know there are some who get all revved up and excited by James’ hard hitting truths and calls for faith. But what if it’s not connecting? What if the challenges of James fall flat? It’s kind of like a...

So my friends will tell you I am obsessed with time. I don’t know when this fascination began… though I know at even an early age, each birthday I would experience felt weighty and full of significance. “I am 16 today. I will only ever be 16 for one year of my life. This is the only 16th year I will ever get to experience.” It all seemed quite normal to me. Until I of course began to realize most...

One of my favorite quotes on the power of language comes from the Jewish thinker and philosopher Abraham Heschel. Heschel is one of those “blow your hair back” kind of writers. Though he lived in the 20th century, in the wake of the horrors of the Halocaust and through the radical cultural revolutions taking place in the 1960’s, Heschel still somehow held on to this belief that the God of the Jewi...

When I was about 20 years old, I happened to pick up Søren Kierkegaard’s justly famous work Fear and Trembling . In it, he pairs the verse from the Apostle Paul in Philippians, “continue to work out your faith with fear and trembling .” (Philippians 2:12) with the story of Abraham’s call to sacrifice Isaac (Genesis 22). What a bold imaginative pairing. Kierkegaard essentially asks, “Is what Paul w...

The initial idea of the Burning Word was always to return to the actual Bible itself, in order to explore how this complex, ancient Word from God continues to breathe and speak to the equally complex and strange culture we find ourselves in. I’m therefore delighted to get back to things with this Study of James . I first read James when I was 13 years old. I was at a Christian camp of some kind, c...

One of the most perplexing challenges for any follower of Jesus is how to hear what God’s word is actually saying - both to them personally and more broadly to us communally and culturally today. The problem for most of us is that we begin with a rather wonderful phenomenon - much like the first time you read a great book or see a great play - the Bible at first can seem to be speaking quite plain...

As I was mapping out this series of video essays, I had a prompt from someone that I should, for at least one of the episodes, simply keep things simple and write a prayer. I love a well worded prayer. The Psalms of course demonstrate the power in a heaving sigh before God to shape not only your own faith but give voice to countless others. I also had the privilege in school of being shown that pr...

So one of the challenges I’m always wrestling through is what to keep and what to throw away when it comes to my background, upbringing, and the various versions and iterations of Christian faith I’ve both attempted and experienced across the years. It can get confusing. When I was young, salvation was presented in quite a simple and straightforward “shoot from the hip” type manner: You’ve done so...

Check out the fourth video essay in my series on “ Finding God in a Restless Age ” I recently found myself in yet another conversation that moved through the oh-so-familiar cycle: “It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other.” “Yeah I know… we’ve just been so busy.” I have repeated these lines so many times that they almost feel like they’ve been memorized as a part in a play that I can’t seem t...

So for the past few weeks I’ve been exploring a series of video essays around “ Finding God in a Restless Age .” If you know me or track with me thinking, you know one of the quandaries I’m most fascinated by in our present moment is how anyone is meant to navigate all the restless churning around us. * You’ve got politics and new cycles. * You’ve got international incidents and global protracted...

In this video essay, pastor-theologian John Perrine explores the growing crisis of loneliness in modern culture. Starting with "The Perks of Being a Wallflower," the recent movie "Friendship" and the "Good Night" trend on tik-tok, we'll explore the implications of research pointing to the alarming rates of loneliness today, particularly among young men. Why are we experiencing such a crisis? The r...

In this video essay, we dive into the critically acclaimed show 'The Bear' and its portrayal of ambition, restlessness, and burnout in our generation. We explore how the show reflects the cultural and generational pressures to achieve excellence while grappling with underlying dysfunction and grief. Join us as we discuss the frenetic pace of life echoed in the series and its deeper parabolic messa...

I won’t even try to pretend that I am not a fan of the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien. I realize that places me in the hopelessly cliche niche of white millennials who grew up with the films at just about the peak age to have post-9/11 angst swell within our teenage souls as we saw elves, dwarfs and Ents fight orcs, wizards, and Trolls. It was just about everything a teenager could wi...

One of the great shifts in late modern life is that we are always waiting on a revolution. Sometimes these revolutions come. Be it 1776 when the American colonies threw off the yoke of our British oppressors (depending of course on where you were sitting at the time) all the way to - when I am writing this, the most recent - the July Revolution in Bangladesh that led to the resignation and exile o...

One of the challenging questions in approaching the Bible (or really any work of literature if you think about it) is what tone you are meant to read the work in. Tone carries quite a bit of weight in human interaction. The phrase, “sure seems like it” could hit all kinds of ways. “Sure… seems like it” could be a concession. Whereas “Sure seems LIKE IT” would carry quite a bit of exasperation. Thi...

For all the changes taking place in our media, technology and entertainment, there is an inevitable power in the release of a good story. Yuval Noah Harari, the immensely popular atheist historian of books like Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind , for all his scientism looks back at the dawning of homo sapiens and suggests the only genius he can find to explain how we came to be distinct as a s...

This is where Revelation starts to get good and strange. We’ve spent time with the churches and the throne room, all of which is far more “preachable” than bowls of judgement, stars falling from heaven, and those two witnesses (that is - unless you turn it into a fiction series of course). However if we can stick with Revelation here and remember its apocalyptic intent to reveal truth about politi...

Some practices of Jesus are easier to master than others. As I’ve pondered this quite a bit… I can’t help but think there is an American impulse to win that undergirds the psyche of our politics. This was made especially clear to me marrying into the culture of another nation, specifically that of a Northern Irish woman. She was quick to point out to me… the Northern Irish don’t expect to win at r...

As I returned to this episode (see the previous posts - these episodes were originally recorded in the late fall of 2020) I’m struck how close I was in pondering these monumental chapters in Revelation 4-5 to the murder of George Floyd and the flood of protests that swept the Globe related to the “Black Lives Matter” movement. This movement of course was not without controversy. I vividly remember...

As we continue in our study of Revelation, something very fresh and interesting happens. Jesus, the one we glimpsed in Revelation 1, who stands behind and before all reality, turns to address the churches which are told he “stands among.” And unfortunately what Jesus sees isn’t very pretty. This is not that surprising. The people of God, for all their calling and faith, often struggle to distingui...

This first episode exploring Revelation and the Politics of Jesus explores why Revelation is not merely about trying to gain a prophetic glimpse of the future but is much more interested in offering political vision for the present. We'll explore Revelation 1, the setting of Revelation at the time of writing, the opening vision of Jesus and what any of it means for us today. (Note - this episode w...