Jacob and the Face of God

In the stories of Jacob and Esau there is a long history of interpretation that presents Jacob in a more positive light than his older twin. That’s understandable in that the Jews trace their lineage through Jacob and not Esau, and it’s rather unthinkable that a non-Jew would be a better example of the...

Redwood Time and the Kingdom of God

The Coast Redwood is the world’s tallest living organism, with the tallest towering 35 to 38 stories high. From a distance a tree that tall looks long and slender like a basketball player, but in fact the Coast Redwood is massive. At eye-level the trunk can be 27 feet in diameter, the length of two VW...

The Hang-Around God

Long before anyone ever came up with a word like “omnipresence”, humans believed that the gods lived “up there,” in the heavens. That’s right, before “Heaven” came to mean “the spiritual realm where the forgiven go to live in bliss forever” it simply meant “the sky and everything else up there.” It’s where...

Bugs, Boys, and the Wrath of God

My father grew up on a farm in south Mississippi, which means that he grew up growing what he ate, and that he ate things like turnip greens. Ugh. I grew up on Southern cooking, but it was my mother’s Southern cooking, not my father’s, and while she also grew up in south Mississippi, she grew up in the...

Forgetting Faith in Formulas

A couple of years ago I was making a guitar with zebrawood for the back and sides. Zebrawood is an African hardwood with bold tan and brown stripes, and it was my first time working with it. The guitar was a cutaway, which is tricky because it requires the wood to be bent into some pretty severe curves. My...

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