2009-01-28

Dealing with Doubt: What happens when life and God don't make sense together?


A Talk for GAP on TAP
2009.01.28
Copyright 2009 Nathan L. Bostian

Tonight our topic is "Dealing with Doubt: What happens when life and God don't make sense together?" Have you ever had doubts? Doubts about God, Jesus, Scripture, Christianity, or religion in general? What do YOU do when what you experience in life does not seem to mesh with what you know- or thought you knew- about God?

There are some forms of religion- of Christianity in particular- who view doubt as the chief enemy of faith in God. The object of this form of spirituality is to build such an immense foundation of faith, with such high walls of proof and certainty surrounding it, that nothing could ever possibly cause the great Castle of Religion to collapse. The irony of course is that no matter how thick the foundation is, the shifting soils of experience cause cracks all the time.

2009-01-17

A Poetic Response to Truth and Deconstruction


OK, so I teach this youth ministry class with two talented colleagues. And this week we talked about youth culture and "postmodernity" (yeah, yeah, overused term… but give me another term to use that is more useful and I will use it).

Anyway, we got into the issues of "discourse as violence" and language and idea-systems as means of power and social control. That led us to talk a bit about deconstruction, and why people feel the need to deconstruct discourse, language, and idea-systems. We also talked about how the youth of today use implicit, simplified, and naive tools of deconstruction when examining Truth claims (perhaps the best is the question "So what?").
This is a bunch of incoherent babble to make us think hard about our incredible love affair with the God of the universe, our astounding infidelities against God, and God's incredible grace to heal and restore us through Christ. Everything on this site is copyright © 1996-2023 by Nathan L. Bostian so if you use it, please cite me. You can contact me at natebostian [at] gmail [dot] com