I realized today that it’s been over a week since my last post. Yikes! I am finishing up some research for an article that will run late this week or early next week. Until then, here are a selection of articles from the last week that are too good to miss.

Can a Messiah College OT Professor Really Teach the Bible’s “Immoral”?
A professor from Messiah College has written a really terrible article on his view of Scripture. You can read it over at Peter Enns’ blog. In this article, Owen Strachan responds to the claim that “not everything in the “good book” is either good, or good for us.”

These two articles on the Super Bowl, commercials, and the portrayal of women are especially good. After all I read yesterday, I’m very glad that we didn’t watch the game and commercials with our boys.

Prizes and Consumables: The Super Bowl as a Theology of Women

First, women play minor roles in most parts of the Super Bowl, and when they are present and featured, they are usually eroticized. Their agency is not chiefly linked to their minds or the wholeness of their persons, but is unmistakably connected to their bodies. There are a few female reporters present, but the play-by-play commentary is wholly delivered by men. This is not unintentional.

When mama ain’t happy…

But I found myself speechless when my five-year-old whispered to me from beneath his white lights after we finally wound our way to a long overdue bedtime, “Mama, I got something to tell you. But it’s bad. You wanna know?”

And I take a deep breath and shake my cowardly head, no. As if I can ward off the world, as if I can unsee the movie reel I know is playing in his head. Because there is no going back from the moment when a young soul describes with surprise and wide eyes about how a man came into a room where a lady was sleeping and tried to creep her shirt off her without waking her up.

Jesus Spent 30 Years Being Boring
This one really spoke to me. I spend most of my time doing fairly mundane things, and it’s hard not to feel guilty that I’m not out doing “great things for God!”

For the first 30 years of his life, Jesus was boring. He was an unknown carpenter who wasn’t doing “big” things for God. He worked alongside his dad, using his hands to shape, shave, and tack together pieces of wood. He quietly studied the scriptures, and grew in stature with God and men. He didn’t have a public ministry. He didn’t write any books, go on a conference tour, adopt an orphan, give away 75% of his income, or go on multiple missions trips. He loved the Lord with all his heart, honored his mother and father, and quietly went about his work.

Was Jesus wasting his life? Absolutely not. He was doing exactly what God had called him to do. As his hands ran over rough planks of wood, he was quietly earning our salvation. Jesus, the lowly carpenter, the furniture maker, was as radical as they come. And for thirty years he was quiet.