Author: Leslie
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Joseph Minich On Generous Hospitality
“Particularly difficult in our own context, is the commitment to a generous hospitality – a difficult-to-achieve lifestyle that leaves space for others to interfere and that contains the boldness to interfere in the lives of others. These sorts of encounters are artificially replaced in our era by work relationships, social media, and so on. But…
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The Most Biblical Scene In Lord Of The Rings
I’m currently working my way through the Lord of the Rings books, and have also found myself watching the movies several times since the beginning of the year. Tolkien’s story is simply a masterpiece, and I believe the movies do a wonderful job of capturing the spirit of the books (if somehow you have never…
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The Myth Of Unending Progress
The last 100 years have seen more technological, medical, and scientific advancements than probably all of the prior centuries of human civilization combined. In less than 150 years, we went from most people traveling on animals to being able to fly thousands of people across the oceans each day and even land people on the…
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Future Light In Present Darkness
The speed of light is approximately 186,000 miles per second – a speed impossible to wrap our minds around. But the universe is massive on a scale that makes even such incomprehensible speed seem somehow not fast enough. For example, the sun is around 93 million miles away from earth. This means it takes a…
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You Are Being Formed
When children are young, we recognize how impressionable they are. Children pick up the world around them like sponges, and often regurgitate whatever they have been soaking in. If they see smiles, they give smiles. If they hear foul language, they speak foul language. Their world shapes them in ways that are easy to define…
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Spiritual Formation In A Secular World
I recently read some comments from Tim Keller on modern secularism, and how it is now seeking to evangelize Christians. Keller points out that children need to be inoculated against secular thinking, because we’re now surrounded by this evangelizing force in our daily lives: “We don’t have as much control over what our kids hear…
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New Growth
We’ve recently been visiting my wife’s family in New Hampshire, and as we often do, we spent some time during our trip camping in the White Mountains. I’m always grateful to get out into nature for a bit (especially in a place that gets no cell service), so I can be removed from distractions and…
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Engage The Culture, Not The Culture War
Erwin Rommel, a military general under Nazi Germany, is quoted as saying, “in the absence of orders, find something and kill it.” While this may strike us as amusing on the surface, it reveals the dark nature of war. War frames everything it touches in the context of war; all of life becomes about war,…
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The Ordinary and Extraordinary Calling of God
Scripture is filled with stories of an extraordinary God doing extraordinary things through ordinary people. Or so we might say – but were they really that ordinary? Certainly they were human – flesh and blood – just like us. Yet, we recognize that in many ways they were extraordinary as well, albeit by God’s grace…
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The Gospel As Gift
What is the gospel? It is, simply, good news. It is the good news that God loves us so much that he sent his only son to die in our place (John 3:16). It is the good news that through Jesus our sins are forgiven and we are justified in the eyes of God (2…