This week I was going to write a post about Washington Irving’s famous tale, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I had planned an elaborate metaphor about how the headless horseman is representative of the modern evangelical church which has severed its body from the head of Christ, casting aside His lordship in favor of a…
Pastor Bryan Hodge joins Bone of Bones again this week in part two of our discussion on the occult. In last week’s post, we defined the occult and began delving into how we should respond as Christians to the growing practice and prevalence of occultism in our society. *** Amber Ornelas: I’ve been to churches…
Humans are endlessly fascinated with the Occult. From séances to Ouija boards, we're obsessed with seeking knowledge from realms we were never meant to roam. This isn’t unique to our age. We see instances of this all throughout the Bible with Israel building altars and praying to other gods, and most infamously, Saul using a…
This is a tough one for me. In the course of considering this post, I’ve written half a dozen introductions, ranted to friends and family, shouted mental objections at myself, binned the whole idea, retrieved the crumpled paper and smoothed out the edges. Still I feel no closer to expressing what I really want to…
You know those cherub figurines? The chubby cheeks and perfectly tousled hair, chins resting thoughtfully in palms, newly sprouted wings, angelic eyes aglow? Harmless, right? But what if I told you there was a sinister heresy behind those winsome smiles, a dark theology imbedded in the lure of baby fat? "Two Cherubs" by Raffaello Sanzio…
The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry weaves a strange story of friendship between the most unlikely people. But slithering between the lines of this Victorian tale is a much darker theme—a theme that permeates much of today’s literature and film: that religion is the biggest threat to reason and progress. Set in London, 1893, The Essex…
Growing up Southern Baptist, I learned at an early age that God wanted to give me stuff. It was simple. All I had to do was name it and claim it and have faith that God would do his part. For the first half of my “Christian” life, this is how I treated our Lord…
I’ll try to keep this short and sweet as we’ve previously touched on the importance of mindfulness in worship, but we need to address a persistent trend in Christian music that should go the way of the dodo before it’s allowed even a swan song. I’m referring to the ongoing proliferation of lyrics that romanticize…
I recently had cause to rewatch The Music Man, seeing as it was the Fourth of July and that timeless classic has always served to remind me of my youth spent in a rural farming community in southeastern South Dakota−a place not so far from Iowa, where every summer day might have been Independence Day…
With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in mainstream culture, the futures depicted in TV shows like Black Mirror and films like Ready Player One don’t seem so far off. This pressing reality, coupled with some disturbing behavior recently discovered in AI, has forced leaders of major tech corporations to take a seat at the table and have an open discussion about morality,…
Bone of Bones 