March 23, 2017 (Nairobi): A 'savior' of the world is anyone who can lead a group of people out of an existential cul-de-sac. People get trapped in institutional religious systems that support life at a status quo but do not favor new expressions of life. To idolize one such person, like Jesus of Nazareth, is …
Russian doll of religion
March 14, 2017 (Nairobi): In Judaism, Yahweh was the god of a single ethnic group: the Hebrews. God's promise to them was Canaan, a physical place, and their 'heaven' was to be a kingdom set up on this earth, in Israel. And their holy book was the Torah, and their holy men were Abraham, Moses, …
Human manifesto
March 13, 2017 (Nairobi): The question has come up recently as to whether I am still a Christian or not. Well, if being a 'Christian' means that I believe that: Jesus Christ was the sole and final human embodiment of God, born of a virgin, who lived divinely without sin or error of any kind, …
Thrice-born
March 10, 2017 (Nairobi): Recently, in trying to settle in my own mind whether I am still a 'Christian' or not, what I realized is that I don't want to be labeled as anything essentially, because a label is just a temporary stopover in the course of evolution. The thing I want to be, the …
Great Tree
March 8, 2017 (Nairobi): Last week when I was trying to explain my metamorphosis to [someone], I had a vision, a parable of my life. It went something like this: Christianity is like a great religious tree that grew up from the seed of Jesus's life and teachings in the soil of Judaism in the …
Self-rising dough
Life and love are like self-rising dough. They contain within them the germ of what they can become, yet whether they can become that depends on the containers that hold them. Little children are preeminent embodiments of life and love, so the same can be said of them: children come into this world already possessing …
Peanut-butter & jelly
February 25, 2017 (Nairobi): A long time ago, people used to eat peanut-butter sandwiches, which, albeit dry, fed them well enough. Then a man was born who started putting jelly on the sandwich. Jelly was really good, and others were attracted to his new sandwiches, but some others killed him because he threatened the stranglehold …
Divine lure
February 24, 2017 (Nairobi, Kenya): I am the accursed one. Yesterday I wondered why I lost faith in the Bible while [a Wycliffe colleague of ours] did not. Perhaps it was because he remained embedded in a loving Christian community, while I did not. The spirit of love - syntropy - has the power to …
Hell and the Devil
"Good is good only because there is evil, and God is God because there is a devil." - Paul Carus February 14, 2017 (Nairobi): On our taxi ride to church, the girls were asking about people going to Hell. I realized I don't know what I believe about hell and consequently don't know what to …
Ever-present origin
"If we...employ the words in a manner that manifests their integrity, they will at least lend the luster of their wholeness to the phenomena they denote." - Jean Gebser Back in early 2017, I was working on a paper about Ik etymology called "Metathesis in the making of Ik etyma." I was super proud of …