The other day I said to a good friend, "You're perfect. It's just integrating the pieces." I remember once reading the theologian John Calvin and he said that the Fall represented the disintegration of the person. Unfortunately, he grimly believed the disintegrated...

So today's toast is based on yesterday's Lap Letter about my experience of going to church. It was actually a positive experience. The three things I felt were: loved, valued, and stretched. Read the Lap Letter to see what I mean. My conclusion is that this kind of...

I noticed something personal about myself the other day. No, it's not that lovely freckle in that special place. It's something I've been doing for years and never even noticed until recently. Here it is... I like to keep 3 kinds of books on the go at the same time. I...

Honestly: I haven't been a fan of the forum format for quite some time. I find it too vast and cumbersome. Clunky. So I and our tech team are redesigning the format of TLS. I'm very excited about it. It's going to be far easier, accessible, and fun to use. And mobile!...

One of my most favorite authors, Wendell Berry, writes in Standing By Words: "To think better, to think like the best humans, we are probably going to have to learn again to judge a person's intelligence, not by the ability to recite facts, but by the good order or...

Some people when they deconstruct their faith and beliefs they can just leave the bible in one fell swoop and never think about it again. Not me. I had to form a new relationship with it over time. Here's how I look at it now. The bible has three epochs: The Yahweh...

One of our newest members, merlentz, who is married to another TLS member Rob Lentz, posted a very vulnerable and honest post about the passing of her mother and her spiritual journey through that experience. You can read about it in the forum thread, "Hello 2", where...

I'm a fan of Thomas Merton. He had a profound influence on my life. I believe he was a monk far ahead of his time. In fact, I believe his writing was unconsciously forecasting his own journey further away from normative Christianity and the arm of the church. It...

I like this quote from Hitchens', God Is Not Great: "Even though he (Socrates) was not in fact an atheist, he was quite correctly considered unsound for his advocacy of free thought and unrestricted inquiry, and his refusal to give assent to any dogma. All he really...