I know this seems like a heretical question, especially for those of us who teach confirmation but also, I suspect, for any of us who went through it. It is, after all, perhaps the most significant religious right of passage in mainline Christianity. But that’s precisely what I want to question: confirmation as a rite of passage. As ample research has shown, confirmation functioned something like graduation for previous generations of Protestant mainline Christians. It was the end of required attendance, and when our kids left our churches in droves we didn’t worry too much about it because we could count on them returning once they’d...

Last week I offered four reasons not to read the Bible literally. But what’s the alternative? I mean, isn’t reading it literally taking the Bible at face value, taking it most seriously? Actually, I’m not sure it is, and in this post I want to begin to offer an alternative. To do so, we need to begin with just a little bit of history. Many of our categories for thinking about truth in relation to facts developed about three and a half centuries ago, but were relatively unknown to biblical authors. You see, disillusioned by the religious fervor that fed the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), the early architects of what would later be called...

And while we’re on the subject of creativity…. David Kelley begins his TEDTalk on developing confidence in your own creative ability with a story most of us can relate to: of having our creative efforts criticized. That simple, ubiquitous experience has created for many of us the sense that we are not creative. Indeed, similar experiences have all but welded to our imaginations the notion that in this life there are two kinds of people: the “creatives” and the rest of us. But Kelley, considered one of America’s leading design innovators, believes not only that each of us is inherently creative but also that, with...