A Traveling Theology

We often like to think of ourselves as adaptable and accepting of other places and other cultures. Sometimes, as much as none of us really want to admit it, that means sort of minimizing cultures down into intelligible symbols we understand rather than trying to understand them on their own terms. Sometimes, it means in…

Jesus warns us that heaven and earth will pass away (Matt 24:35) but there is a way in which life here makes that feel distant. Paul adds his voice, warning us that “the present form (σχῆμα, ‘appearance’) of this world is passing away”. Jesus and Paul both urge us to invest in eternal, unseen heavenly…

I vividly remember the joy and excitement of my high school graduation in 2014. There was a sense of victory, for having slogged through IB exams (though scores were still pending), committed to a school whose name I could not pronounce (Bryn Mawr), and largely finished what I had set out to do. I was…

            At the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, there is an amazing sculpture that can only be appreciated from the sky.  You can see it, when you look up the Museum on Google Maps: “PICTURE THIS!” the sculpture says – a message for birds, for God, for the Maps Staff. On the ground,…

Augustine’s Literal Interpretation of Genesis This blog, “A Traveling Theology” has a fundamentally optimistic view of life on Earth. Our time here as sojourners is a difficult adventure, where we are tourists in a strange place. Through the process of experiencing creation, both the good things about life and the bad, we come to know…

Warning: this post is NOT theological in nature (also this post is unusually long and contains no pictures) Today, I am finally (almost) recovered from a week-long combination of illnesses I picked up in Turkey. It seems that I got some sort of viral gastroenteritis and, through vomiting, gave myself a minor neck injury that…

A Response to “The Case Against Travel”  The original article, “The Case Against Travel: It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best” is by Agnes Callard, in the New Yorker (June 24, 2023). Despite its name, the article is not really a coherent case but rather…

So much of the Christian life is grappling with the paradoxes Scripture gives us. God is three, God is one. God is infinite, beyond all imagining and yet God poured himself out into the finite world. God is sovereign, and yet we have free choice. God will favor His people, but they will be persecuted.…

While traveling, there are lots of little reminders that this is not where you belong. Many of those reminders, when you are a tourist, are good: new foods, different landscapes, different languages. Some of those reminders can be somewhat uncomfortable, and especially on a long trip those uncomfortable reminders tend to pile up. I have…

There are moments that seem too perfect to bear. We were riding ATVs behind the Valley of the Queens in Luxor, Egypt. I looked like a bandit, with my scarf tied over my mouth and nose. It had been 104 that day, but finally, the sun was sinking low in the sky, and a cool…