The Place

We explore some principles of 'being the boss inside'. Children need to guided in habituating their emotions and desires to love the truly good and the reject what is not good, and in the minds they need to learn to think about 'what they are thinking about'. This is just the habit of becoming responsibly self aware of your inner life, and taking spiritual control of it as you grow. This is also Rob's final podcast as pastor.

Learning to control and discipline our speech is among the most important habits we can form in life. We explore useful subjects such as which bad habits to avoid, a couple of really tough ones even for adults, and finally the spiritual value of inner truthfulness.

We look at the tradition of virtue formation in children, forming habit of desire, emotion and willing. Good character formation is being habituated to desire and affirm the good and to reject and disaffirm the bad. Children will also have to learn to be the boss over their own bodies.

An introduction to the principle of forming authentic faith in the Christian tradition, but principles designed for progressive post-evangelicals who want to protect their children from fundamentalism while still grounding them in orthodoxy and orthopraxy.

The final chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans, with its long list of names and goodbyes, contains some gems of ancient history such as the mysterious female apostle. And more....

Paul begins summarizing his core teachings as he heads toward the end of this letter, mainly his continued hope that Christians would defer to one another faith and conscience to keep unity and peace in the community.

All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial or wise. Thus thought St Paul. But what does this mean for Christian life, for moral reasoning, for living in community together?

We look at Paul's great pastoral concern for harmony and unity in the churches. What do we do about areas a deep disagreement between believers, where judgement of one another and feeling of superiority and inferiority seep in to threaten peace? Paul appeals to both our radical freedom in Christ as well as our even more radical concern for the sensitive consciences of others.

How do we live in harmony with a brutal and pagan culture like that of the ancient Roman empire? How far do we go in submitting to human authorities?

Harmony, not ego. That's Paul's practical teaching the Roman Christian community. These proverbial tidbits of wisdom in chapter 12 show remarkable similarity to many Stoic teachings of the day, proving that Paul was product of his time and culture, as are we all.