Welcome!

Hey all,
Welcome to Prison Epistles! I hope you enjoy this course and find it challenging, energizing, mind and soul-stretching, and life-giving! I hope you enjoy plowing deeply through these powerful texts as much as I have. Please be sure to familiarize yourself with the syllabus and related documents so that you can maximize what you take away from the course. Please contact me at any time and let me know how things are going!
Tim

Two weeks in!

We're two weeks into Prison Epistles -- I hope you're enjoying it so far. I've found your journal entries largely very thoughtful and thought-provoking, and I've commented on a few of them.

I hope you remember to maintain a dual focus on the Scriptures and on our culture. We need to grapple with what is going on in Scripture, always having our understanding transformed. And we need to constantly be re-interpreting culture in that light--not necessarily judging everything, but always trying to understand, sometimes affirming things we see, sometimes learning from culture how to be more faithful Jesus-followers, sometimes discerning where patterns of life reflect corruption of one sort or another. Just to say, keep reflecting on culture as you reflect on what you're discovering!

And remember, hit me with whatever questions you've got in any of the reading. Have a great weekend!

Welcome!

Welcome to Prison Epistles! I'm very excited about this course and the material we'll be working through. I've spent the last decade or so immersed in these texts and they have radically changed my life. I'm looking forward to being refreshed again as we work through them together. We'll discover how redemptively counter-cultural these texts are, and how much they have to teach us about God, Jesus Christ, Paul, suffering, the power of community, cross-shaped living (cruciformity), and how God's power is unleashed through human weakness. I hope you find this course both challenging and invigorating!