Parchment & Pen Blog

Mark Juergensmeyer’s book Terror in the Mind of God claims that religion is violent by nature. It tends to “absolutize and to project images of cosmic war”—even if the ultimate goal is peace and order. To prevent violence and bloodshed to get to this point, religion needs the tempering influence of “rationality and fair play [...]

I don’t think that there is a more valuable phrase that I have learned than this. “The palatability of a doctrine does not determine its veracity.” I believe this is true. There are two key words here: “palatability” and “determine.” Palatability refers to appeal, tastefulness, and emotional response to something. “Determine” according to the dictionary [...]

Charisma: “Power or personal quality that gives an individual influence or authority over large numbers of people.” Over the years I have learned that people enter the ministry for a variety of reasons. Among these reasons are: 1. Passion for the Gospel due to a life that has been recently transformed. 2. A “calling” through [...]

Friends, As you have probably heard, our ministry has become the target of many attacks over the last couple of weeks. Right now, we are still disabled in many ways. We have the store back up as well as having the blog functional. But we still have not been able to get the main Drupel [...]

I’ve been doing an occasional series on spiritual mentors who have greatly impacted my life. I talked about Joe Aldrich, a man who had a huge influence on my life in my late teens and early twenties, helping to set me in the direction of going to seminary, and Dallas Seminary in particular. And his [...]

As many of you know, we had a lot of ice here in OKC last week. Everyone I know slipped and fell at least once. I slipped and fell three times! Well, to make a long story short, my back began to progressively give me problems over the next few days. Sunday, I could not [...]

Best of Parchment and Pen On the flight back from Athens last week, I sat in front of a gregarious Irish gentleman. He was a medical doctor in Dallas, but didn’t even come close to losing his native accent. We talked theology most of the flight. He was fascinated by CSNTM’s work of photographing ancient [...]