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Barry ponders what happens when we start treating the people within our gates as enemies. Maybe the answer isn’t to guard the gates more carefully, but to open them wider. Psalm 124 reminds us that living in the world means living with people (yes, those people), and we don’t always make that easy for one […]

Barry takes a necessary detour from the Psalms to look at Romans 2:1-13. Come to find out, we’re pretty good at spotting other people’s flaws—and somehow a little less gifted at recognizing our own. Paul turns the spotlight back on us, challenging our assumptions about who needs grace, who deserves judgment, and where we actually […]

We talk a lot about mercy; but what happens when we stop looking at mercy as something God does and start looking at the God who gives it? The surprising thing is that God doesn’t seem to get tired of us in the way we get tired of ourselves—or of each other. Our failures don’t […]

Ever looked at the moon during the day and thought, “Huh… that seems backwards”? The fuller the moon gets, the less time we see it in the daytime sky—and somehow that leads us to inverse proportionality, human behavior, and the curious ways those two things might have more in common than you’d expect. We’ll start […]

Psalm 122 is about going to Jerusalem, gathering with God’s people, and praying for peace. Which sounds lovely—until you remember that being around other people is sometimes…a lot. In this episode, Barry takes a closer look at this little psalm and its surprisingly practical vision for community. We must reconsider what it means to seek […]

It’s another conversation about what happens when philosophy and ministry start asking each other questions. And, as it turns out, they have quite a few. We get into sophistry, the ways people can become very good at making arguments without necessarily making good arguments, and the complicated relationship between doctrine and ethics. What we believe […]

Barry acknowledges there are some things you can learn by studying philosophy that ministry will never teach you—and some things ministry will teach you that you could never learn from a philosophy textbook. In this episode, he explores the surprising things learned on both sides of that divide, while admitting that philosophy and ministry have […]

Psalm 119 is basically 176 verses of the psalmist saying, “God, I really, really love Your Word.” And while that might sound a little intense, there’s something wonderfully practical underneath all of it: what gets into us eventually comes out of us. Our interaction with God’s word is less about simply reading it but rather, […]

We all have lines that tell us who we are—and who we’re not. Race, nationality, politics, and a whole host of other identities can shape us in ways we barely notice. In Part 2 of Self-De-Centered, Barry looks at what happens when those identities become walls, and at Jesus’ very different way: incarnation. If we’re […]

It turns out there’s a pretty big problem with making yourself the center of the universe: you’re not the center of the universe. But what does that actually mean for the way we understand ourselves? In the first episode of this series, Barry takes a look at the self from several different angles—biological, psychological, sociological, […]