Sturtz Stuff

The year 2020 wasn't so great for a lot of reasons. Yet I did manage to read some good stuff during the year. Here is my little list of books that I read and found enriching, challenging and helpful. They are not all the books and articles that I read but they are the ones that I felt like sharing. Here they are in no particular order.  In September of 2019 my good friend Jerl Joslin suddenly passed from this life into the next. Jerl served several Christian Churches in Oklahoma. The majority of his life was spent preaching, teaching and encouraging fellow ministers and their families. In 2014 Jerl and his wife Dani started a new ministry called Refresh Ministry. Refresh Ministry seeks to refresh and encourage local ministers. Jerl drove countless miles across Oklahoma touching base with local ministers to be a trusted listening ear, someone who would pray for them and be an overall source of encouragement. It is the encouragement part that is often so lacking in the lives of loca...

In Jesus' day shepherding was not the noble occupation it had once been during the days of Patriarchs. In a mostly agricultural economic system these folks were grazers. And grazing isn't good if you're trying to grow crops. Shepherds existed at the bottom of the social ladder right next to tax collectors and dung sweepers. Yet they were among the first to be told that a new King was being born. Not the socially connected. Not the politically powerful. What good news it must have been for those shepherds. Someone cares. Someone thinks that we aren’t disgusting. And not just someone . . . God.  God has visited us and given us something precious. God has announced good news. Good because it is redeeming, restoring and refreshing. News because something actually happened.  It is no surprise then that Jesus quotes from the book of Isaiah in Luke 4 “to proclaim good news to the poor.” And by poor Isaiah and Jesus don’t mean some kind of nebulous spiritually poor. They mean the p...

Summarized here is the quandary. Our culture and much of our daily living is done with little to no sense of the transcendent (God). This is the working out of the thoughts and ideas that came out of the Enlightenment and the Reformation. As Charles Taylor highlights in his book The Secular Age we have gone from an enchanted world to a disenchanted one. In a disenchanted world the vertical connection to the transcendent (God) has collapsed onto our horizontal daily life.  The implications of this means that the way to please God/have a good life is found mostly in the political pursuits of justice and peace. Many of the squabbles that liberals and conservatives get into centering on peace and justice touch on five areas: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity (see Jonathan Haidt’s book The Righteous Mind ). Conservative type folks will appeal to all five areas, especially authority, while liberal type folks will appeal mostly...

I decided to do some checking for myself into the issue of if the US voting system has serious issues with fraudulent ballots. It would seem to me that, after seeking out reliable information, that the US does not have a serious issue with fraudulent ballots (including mail-in ballots.) Among other resources that I checked here are two that offer trustworthy information. The Brennan Center  The Brennan Center is a non-partisan think tank. Tons of solid information that points to a voter system (mail-in or in-person) that is: 1. Able to detect fraudulent ballots well (mail-in or in-person) and 2. Has almost non-existent issues with fraudulent ballots. Click here - the link will take you to a PDF that has multiple links to reliable studies and reports.  Washington Post A Washington Post analysis of data collected by three vote-by-mail states with help from the nonprofit Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC) found that officials identified just 372 possible cas...

If you are having questions about whether Noah’s flood was a worldwide flood does that make you a heretic? If I am having questions about the exact nature of God’s inspiration of Scripture and wondering just what kind of book the Bible is, does that make you a heretic? If I really can not put 100% of my heart behind The Chalcedonian Definition of the nature of Jesus Christ . . . well they said that makes you a heretic . . . but does it make you a heretic? If I am giving serious contemplation to changing my political affiliation does that make me a heretic?  Out of the things outlined above the most consequential, in the American church today, would be changing your political affiliation. For some Christians changing your political affiliation would definitely get you labeled as a heretic. Truth be told many Christians struggle with or have gone through seasons of struggling with doubts. In fact doubting is not in opposition to faith nor it is a sign of a lack of faith. Doubting is ...

I have read multiple social media posts making the claim that hospitals are getting paid money for Covid-19 deaths. I found this claim shocking to say the least. So I did a little checking for myself. This list is a small bit of the information that I found. What I found was that hospitals are not getting paid for Covid-19 deaths. What is happening is that some hospitals, due to the CARES Acts passed by congress, saw about a 20% increase in payments only for medicare patients that required treatment for Covid-19. Here are just a few pieces of information that I found . . . . Do Colorado hospitals get extra money for coronavirus cases and deaths? Yes and no. Hospitals do get higher Medicare reimbursements for COVID-19 care, but there are no such payments for deaths by By JESSICA SEAMAN Denver Post But there is no financial benefit to having a death certificate state that a person’s cause of death was directly tied to COVID-19, said Dr. Leon Kelly, El Paso County’s cor...

The Old Testament prophets are often placed in the category of being fortune tellers. After all it is the prophets, such as Isaiah, that talk about the day when God’s Messiah will come. However, the prophets are offering us something more. The Prophets help us connect the dots between the world as it is and the world as it might be. A small example of this can be found in reading Jeremiah 4:11-12 and 23-28. Reading up to and including 4:11-12 the people have become numb and apathetic towards God. Yet the prophet is out to jolt the people out of their collective denial and into the reality that human sin has wide ranging effects. Jeremiah offers a terrible warning that “a scorching wind” is coming their way. Yet, just like us, the people remain in their denial. Verse 22 describes the people as “senseless children” with no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil without any perception of how to do good. The community is on the path of self-destruction. Even with this heartbreak...

Chronically anxious families and societies and church communities have five key characteristics. These characteristics come from Edwin Friedman's book A Failure of Nerve. The page notations in parentheses are from A Failure of Nerve.  Reactivity Instead of self-regulation, the regressed society, family or church community is characterized by reactivity. Communication is characterized by ‘you’ statements (‘you are so pig-headed!’, ‘you are just like her!, You are the problem.). Highly reactive systems are a panic in search of a trigger. Friedman sees this same reactivity within American society, where people constantly interfere with others’ self-expression, react to them on a hair-trigger, take disagreement far too seriously, and ‘brand the opposition with ad hominem personal epithets (chauvinist, ethnocentric, homophobic, and so on)’ (64). Leaders dealing with systems that are reactive often become less imaginative and eventually are worn down to the point that th...