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...