Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from November, 2019

A Beautiful Day In the Neighborhood, a review

I have a confession. I was not a fan of Mister Rogers Neighborhood. As a kid, I enjoyed the land of Make-Believe. I especially liked the puppets. There were times when Mister Rogers would do teaching or build something, and that would fascinate me. I always preferred Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo. When my kids began to watch television, they didn’t seem to be drawn to the Neighborhood, so I didn’t have to change my opinion. When Fred Rogers died, there began a process that many are calling secular canonization. Mister Rogers became larger than his television persona and viewership. People began to extol the wonders of what he meant to them. The last decade has seen the popular attraction to Mister Rogers grow to a level greater than public television gave him access to. Two movies have been released in just over a year’s time span that highlight the quality and character of Fred Rogers. The first was the biographical film Won’t You Be My Neighbor. This year sees the release of a ...

Changing the Mind of God, part 1

I am currently working through a philosophical exercise with theological implications. I was reading the book Boundaries by Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend. If you are not familiar, the book is about relational boundaries between people to create healthy relationships. Chapter 13 of that book is called Boundaries and God . A few pages into that chapter, I read this idea: ...God does not want us to be passive in our relationship with him {sic} either. Sometimes, through dialogue, he changes his mind. We can influence him because ours is a real relationship of the kind Abraham had with God (Gen. 18:16-33). God said that he would destroy Sodom, yet Abraham talked him out of it if he could find ten righteous people. Foregoing the example of  Abraham, I was intrigued by the idea that in the relationship God offers, we can influence God's decision-making process. Changing the mind of God sounds like it may be too good to be true. But could it be possible, I wondered. I decid...