Admission Essay

October 30, 2007Posted inPersonal Background11 Comments

If anyone is interested, this is my admission essay I wrote for acceptance into seminary for my Masters of Arts and Religion degree. I ended up being accepted. Hope you enjoy it!

I began my walk as a Christian later then my childhood friends growing up. Most of them had dedicated their lives to the Lord when they were between 3-5 years old; something that to this day I am suspicious of. At the time, I remember thinking that such spiritual experiences would be impossible for a very young child – for it takes a serious amount of understanding to fathom the complexity of hearing God’s invitation. For me, the time when I encountered God was much later.

Another dream

October 17, 2007Posted inDivine Revelation, Dreams4 Comments

I had another one of those dreams.

This time I was in the South – probably during the Civil rights era. In my dream, I had grown up in this mid-sized town somewhere, and it appeared that I was somewhere in my 60s or 70s. There was a big scandal that had just happened in town – an African American boy of about 15 or so had been caught dating a white girl. It was the talk of the town. Nothing seemed to have been done by the law in the town, but the poor boy was the object of scorn anytime he showed his face in public. Unfortunately, it was a small enough town that everyone knew each other, so it was hard for him to hide.

Faith & Atheism

October 17, 2007Posted inAtheism, Belief1 Comment

I recently read a great post by John Remy at MindOnFire.com regarding the criticism about atheists also having “faith” as a fundamental tenant of their world view. I can see why this criticism is annoying – the atheist (loose or strict) relies on evidence and rationality for their world view, and to be told their fundamental beliefs are (surprise!) just based on blind faith, will see this as an insult.

Accountability & Authority

October 12, 2007Posted inChurch, Religion, Spiritual LifeNo Comments

Hierachy vs. Network

*updated on Oct. 15th*

I wanted to speak about a thought I closed my last post series with: accountability. This religious term has a lot of baggage for me, and I am assuming it may to my readers as well. But understanding what it really is, or at least defining a healthy version of it, is important for formulating a final idea I am trying to reach – what a good working spiritual authority structure looks like. I have concluded in my past post that current religious power structures don’t take into account the fallibility of human moral corruption. Human leaders + power = inevitable corruption. Just because people are Christian and are expected to be moral doesn’t protect them from moral decline that people in all other spheres of power are susceptible to. To temper this unfortunate truth, I believe a leadership structure overhaul is needed. In the closing thoughts of my last post, I mentioned that the glue to hold a better structure together is – you guessed it – spiritual accountability, a feature that is hopelessly broken due to the way traditional structures are designed.