Jesus Creed Blog: Welcome!

Our favorite topics are Jesus himself, the Bible, the Christian faith, the Church today, and we also venture off into topics like coffee and the Chicago Cubs and what Kris (my wife) and I are doing these days ... and we talk about North Park University, where I teach, and we talk about politics some. Many of our posts will derive from someone else's book's central ideas and so we talk quite often about books. And we tend to do books in a series, and one of the books we are presently studying and conversing about in a civil manner is by J. Kameron Carter. That book is called Race: A Theological Account. Don't let the difficulty of its prose fool you: this is a profound and incredibly practical book about how theology itself has cloaked racism in its inner workings. I have asked some other professors to blog along with me.

Another topic we take up often is science and faith, but I don't always do those posts. I ask others to help me, and you will meet "RJS" -- a professor friend who knows her stuff about science.

Please be patient with us as we move our archives over and get the "categories" to the right re-adjusted.

Over the next two weeks or so I will introduce the Beliefnet.com community to our writings so for some this might be old hat ... but it might be a good chance for us to think through the central ideas that will shape this blog.

We come to Beliefnet.com with a community of friends who have established a civil form of conversation. Yes, over the 3.5 years of blogging on Jesus Creed we have had to add names to our "moderation" queue and we don't like doing that. But, because here at Jesus Creed we value civility so much we find it necessary and helpful to moderate comments intentionally and carefully.

We value conversation. If you want to chat with us -- join us. We imagine this community as sitting at a table over coffee with one another. We are not trying to win, to score points, to insult, or to shame others. Sometimes someone gets a little sharp with others and we all stand back and say, "That's not the way we operate at Jesus Creed." This community monitors itself. If you are asked by others to tone it down, please tone it down. If we want a civil conversation we have to work hard at protecting one another from insults. And we have to discipline ourselves to ask this simple question: "Would I talk like this to a friend over coffee?"