Andy Unedited – Page 4 – Exploring Books, Life, and Writing

Career Perspective (2): Finding Satisfaction

May 23, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

Tony loves teaching college students. Every time he is in front of a class and sees that wonderful moment of insight in the eyes of people in the room, he feels, This is what I was made for.

The problem is, he can’t make a living doing this. More colleges are doing on-line courses. They are hiring fewer full-time professors and more part-time adjunct faculty. And even those positions are hard to come by. So he pieces together other jobs to pay the bills.
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Career Perspective (1)

May 16, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

A friend said, “I have a number of coworkers who feel disappointed in the course their careers have taken. They’ve not succeeded or advanced as they had hoped. They feel that what they have to offer hasn’t been fully utilized. What would you say to them?”
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We Were Eight Years in Power

May 10, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

The dramatic pendulum swing from a President Obama to a President Trump has left analysts, both right and left, scrambling to understand what happened. In We Were Eight Years in Power, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has become the premier commentator from Black America, responds by collecting eight articles he published in The Atlantic, one per year, during the Obama administration. To each he adds an extended preface which reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of each piece, and which looks forward to implications the ideas in each essay might have.
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Cultivating a Lost Art

May 2, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

Civil conversation is sadly a lost art. In Winsome Persuasion, however, Tim Muehlhoff and Richard Langer contend that the more civil we are, the more persuasive we become.
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The Psalmist Reflects on Genesis

April 25, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

In my previous post, I asked, What exactly is meant that people are in the image of God? The answer Psalm 8 offers reinforces these thoughts. As the psalmist reflects on the creation described in Genesis 1 and our place in it, he wonders what makes humans so special. He then responds, “You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet” (verse 6).
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The Image of God

April 18, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

What does it mean that we are made in the image of God? Over the centuries many options have been proposed for what Genesis 1:27 means.

So God created mankind in his own image,

in the image of God he created them;

male and female he created them

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Walking Through Twilight

April 11, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

The irony of Walking Through Twilight is not lost on its author. Douglas Groothuis is a philosopher who has often taught and written on suffering. Here he offers a lament about the suffering he and his wife have been going through over many years as she slowly, so agonizingly slowly, deteriorates from a rare form of dementia.
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Tradition, Scripture and Slavery

April 4, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

How do we know if our interpretation of Scripture is correct? One way is to weigh it against the general consensus of the church throughout its history. That is, by tradition. If we are coming up with a view that is at odds with the creeds or the historical views on the trinity, the full divinity and full humanity of Jesus, his bodily resurrection, or other core tenets of the faith, we should be very suspicious of ourselves. We may be right, but probably we are not.
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The Lament of Christ (Mark 15:34)

March 28, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Mark 15:34

I have attended worship services in a variety of traditions throughout my life, but they tended to have one thing in common–they began with praise to God and then moved to confession. This is a good and appropriate model to follow that has a lot of merit. When we see how holy and good God is, we see more clearly by contrast that we are not.
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Christ Forsaken (Mark 15:34)

March 21, 2018 by Andy Le Peau

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Mark 15:34

On the cross, Jesus quotes from the first verse of Psalm 22, a psalm of lament. Psalm 22 begins with a strongly stated complaint that God is far away (vv. 1-2), which is followed by the statement of confidence in God (vv. 3-5). The psalmist (identified in the title of the psalm as David) then enumerates the specifics of his lament (vv. 6-18), followed by his petition for deliverance (vv. 19-21). He concludes with a vow to proclaim God’s goodness to the people (vv. 22-26), which will be known to the ends of the earth in generations to come (vv. 27-31).
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