StephenBarkley.com

The infinite God has no boundaries and our minds cannot set limits to him or to his love. —Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, 79.

I’m a multi-billionaire . . . just not in Canada. I keep a genuine Five Billion Dollar banknote from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe pinned to the wall above my laptop screen to mock the so-called no-god of Mammon. The Zimbabwean dollar has had a troubled past. From its introduction in 1980 it’s been reintroduced [...]

The Subversion of Christianity © 1986 Trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley Eerdmans 212 pages Ellul’s Subversion is a compelling and challenging read. It’s challenging because Ellul was a French Christian-anarchist with a thorough grasp of church history. He often addresses situations and theological issues that are opaque to the modern Western reader. It’s compelling due to [...]

Too often we just do what makes sense to us and ask God to bless it. —Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, 219.

Ah, the moment I’ve been waiting for. The question I’ve never been able to understand: now that the Gentile mission has flourished, what about the Jewish people? This question is exacerbated by the prophetic fervor that has gripped my tradition ever since Israel became a political player on the world scene. I’m excited to how [...]

Key Questions about Christian Faith: Old Testament Answers © 2010 Baker Academic 345 pages John Goldingay is one of our time’s leading Old Testament scholars. To oversimplify his method, Goldingay prefers to allow the text to dictate its own needs and concerns, rather than to read modern questions and worldviews back into scripture (in contrast [...]

Ellul’s The Subversion of Christianity is just too good to contain within one Weekend Wisdom post. Here’s the last of five good quotes: Believers, then, are those who have the wisdom and strength to rob material realities of their seductive power, to unmask them for what they are, no more, and to put them in [...]

Have you ever taken a personality test? A few years ago I went through the Birkman system. After completing a series of seemingly unending questions about all aspects of my life, the results were fed into a machine. A few weeks later the Birkman representative debriefed myself and the rest of the staff on the [...]

A Dark Matter © 2010 Doubleday 416 pages I was introduced to Straub through his work with King on the Talisman and Dark House books. Given their tie to the Dark Tower books, his ability to write about two overlapping worlds (and more) became obvious. In A Dark Matter he’s right back in this element, [...]

Ellul’s The Subversion of Christianity is just too good to contain within one Weekend Wisdom post. Here’s the fourth of five good quotes: Freedom is hard to live with. It is terrible. It is a venture. It devours and demands. It is a constant battle, for around us there are always traps to rob us [...]