Rethinking The Lord's Prayer

Where is Our Joy?

Henry David Thoreau, tucked away in his Walden cabin, famously said that most of us lead lives of quiet desperation. That was in 1845. Today, things are not so quiet. Anxiety and depression are regular rites of passage from which millions of Americans never graduate. Civility meanwhile has long been dropped from our national discourse. It’s a sad indictment of a country where so many pride themselves in a Christian heritage. We have the highest levels of... 

Our Father Who Art In Heaven

The Lord’s Prayer begins with an idea that seems easy enough to understand. Jesus wants to establish God as our heavenly Father, and we as his children. What we often fail to notice though is what Jesus doesn’t say–yet what he leaves out is just as important. What Jesus doesn’t say is that we should pray to God as “My Father.” We are taught to address him as “Our Father” because prayer is not about individualism.... 

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Jesus establishes God as a heavenly father figure, but that’s not enough for most of us. Without a name, he seems lost in abstraction. Try as we might, we simply can’t bring him into view. There is only the vague presence of someone hovering around us–like the adult of a Charlie Brown Peanuts Special, always outside the frame, speaking in a strange indecipherable language. Jesus understands our predicament, but unlike Moses, who chiseled the... 

Read More Of The Lord's Prayer E-Book

Laughter & Prayer

The Three Laughing Monks

In China, there is the legend of the three laughing monks. They are also today sometimes referred to as the three laughing saints (but of course in a very SBNR way). The monks only ever did one thing: on entering a new village, they would stand in the market place and start laughing. They would laugh with their whole being (mind, body, heart, and soul) and suddenly people would wake up to the Life and Kingdom of God that surrounded them. A crowd would soon gather... 

Prayer & The Oracle of Jesus

In this final installment of our special series on the Founding Fathers and their thoughts on God, Religion, & the Divine, we move to farmer, politician, and guerilla revolutionary leader Ethan Allen, who perhaps is best known for leading the Green Mountain Boys (and other fighters) in their raid and capture Fort Ticonderoga, a strategic victory which severely hampered communication between the northern and southern units of the British army. Like Thomas... 

Learning Thai: Language Books

Thai-English Cognate Dictionary

There are a lot of Thai Dictionaries and phrasebooks for sale for farangs (Westerners). Some are quite good; others not so good. The classic Robertson’s Practical English-Thai Dictionary remains our personal favorite. But the drawback that most Thai-English dictionaries... 

How to Speak Street Thai

When it comes to learning Thai, the biggest obstacle is how to speak Thai. That is, how to speak the Thai language without sounding like a Thai phrasebook, how to speak Thai more naturally like a native speaker. One of the problems with many Thai language books is that the... 

Learn Thai: Teaching in Thailand

If you are teaching in Thailand and want to quickly add to your working Thai vocabulary, then the Original Thai-English Cognate Dictionary & Learning Tool is an excellent resource to have. The book is filled with hundreds of Thai-English loanwords, as well as English words... 

Read More Thai Language Posts

SBNR: Daily Motivationals

Kerouac – God is Pooh Bear

Towards the very end of Jack Kerouac’s classic novel On the Road, he writes several memorable lines, which he read famously on The Steve Allen Show in 1956. One passage is as follows: “In Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh-Bear?… The comment... 

Jesus the Satirist

In our SBNR Motivational The Laughter of Christ, we talked about how Jesus must have had a great sense of humor. Finding examples of the Nazarene’s humor isn’t easy though when reading the Gospels. Some folks have pointed towards Jesus’s admonition that we shouldn’t worry about the speck in our brother’s eye when we have a beam in our own as one example. But... 

Praising Contradictions

There is one thing that many scientists and orthodox Christians share: that is, a dislike of contradictions. That an electron can appear as either a particle or a wave is as disturbing to the scientist, as the mystical phrase You are God and not God is to the evangelical Baptist. Literal Bible readers take extraordinary flights of fancy to erase the many contradictions of the Good Book, or... 

Read More Progressive Motivationals