Wherein I reflect on gay marriage and just a wee little bit upon marriage itself. Please note, I really have no business writing this stuff. But I just don't have the sense…

Okay, so during my one-hour drive home from work a couple days ago, I was listening to public radio and heard a story about a woman who was undergoing a divorce from her spouse — another woman. (Turns out it's as hard to get a legal gay divorce as it is to get a gay marriage in some states. That's why the story…)

Partway through her narrative, this lady described how, after the wedding, she and her lover stopped at a homey little restaurant for dinner, mentioning that they had just gotten married. A few minutes later the server delighted them when he arrived with compliments from the chef and

photo: ukdenners

Overheard recently: "I'm wondering what's the difference between church and the bar?"

In church you pray for the Spirit. In a bar you pay for the spirits? (Sorry, couldn't resist!)

Anyways...

Everybody knows your name…

When Jennifer and I lived in Springfield, MO, and worked at the Assemblies of God headquarters, our friendly pagan neighbors invited us to join them at a neighborhood bar for lunch. We were on our way back home from church where we had invited them, so we figured a little tit for tat was probably in order.

For the second time in my short life as a blogger, I've been meme-tagged by an evil blogging compatriot hoping to provoke me into playing a silly blog-tagging game, generating more content, and generally surrendering to mass hysteria.

Okay. I'm in! But only because I'm a sucker for attention. And because, like the "One Book Meme," this question interests me, and I like it.

By the way, I was tagged by Carl Thomas over at the Revival Blog who, believe it or not, actually got a touch snarky with me in his post. This is a bit like playing touch football, only instead of being touched, or tagged, or merely pushed, you get a wedgie:

Social justice gets a bad rap among many Evangelicals and Fundamentalists, but Tony Campolo sets us straight. Check out this video.

My Spider-Man 3 movie-based Bible Study is here, at long last! I have permission from CTI to provide the study here on my site. Over the next few days or weeks, I'll post the previous combo-study I wrote for Spider-Man 1 and Spider-Man 2 as well.

Warning: the following contains spoilers! Stop now and do not read below this paragraph if you hate knowing anything beyond what the trailers reveal.

Spider-Man 3
The greatest battle lies … within

The first two Spider-Man films established Peter Parker and his super-heroic alter-ego as a popular and profitable theatrical draw: Spidey is loveably unstoppable and Peter Parker is the nice boy everybody wants to see "get the girl."

But Spider-Man 3 severs those silky threads of comfortable niceness, dumping Peter Parker and Spider-Man into a dark abyss where evil infects the

Greed is the surprising accompaniment to almost all our sins.

We all like lists. They help create organized presentations, and they are easy to remember. Perhaps that is why God chose a list format to present some of his most well-known laws. But what if we took that list — the Ten Commandments — and reduced it to its essence? What basic sins would we identify? One hopelessly alliterative preacher condensed the Decalogue to a clever three-point quip: man's chief temptations are "gold, girls, and glory." Gary Downing, in his article "Accountability That Makes Sense," agrees, calling them "the three issues with which we all struggle: money, sex, and power."

But perhaps we could distill even further, to a sort of grand unifying sin: greed. It is the misplaced love and desire that drives broken

Some of you may have heard of Tim Sanders. He was the Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo! from 2001–2003, before that he ran an in-house think-tank for Yahoo! Lately he’s been serving as the Leadership Coach there, while also hitting the leadership conference tour, and authoring a couple books along the way. His two main messages appear to be learning to love (in business), and learning how to be likeable. Conference attendees say his message is life-changing.

His first book, Love Is the Killer App, was a slender 214-page tome—that started out much larger. He cut 140,000 words from the first draft (my kind of guy … write long, cut short!), and the nut of his first book

J. Lee Grady, over at Charisma magazine, has issued a call for clearheadedness among the charis-manics in his editorial, “It’s Getting Really Weird Out There.” The article cites strange goings-on at various Charismatic churches, and some classical Pentecostal churches.

This is where I cite my earlier post, “The Problem with Pentecostal Distinctives,” to reinforce his point. This is what happens when any group elevates experience and subjectivity above a commitment to sound biblical hermeneutics. This is why Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 12-14, addressing bad theology based on experience, grounding the Corinthians instead in the greatest commandment: love.

More than anything, we need to adhere to first principles: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength, and soul; and love your neighbor as yourself. While none of us, not one, can claim to keep these commandments perfectly, it’s the goal we aim