Theoretically, it’s not only possible to hold orthodox (or, if you prefer, traditional) theological views in one hand and progressive social and political views in the other, but also, in an abstract, platonic, logical sense, more probable than not, all else being equal. That the combination appears rare in my experience of American reality must be the result of something external to The Book: Perhaps my limited vantage. Perhaps alogical sociohistorical pressures.
\n", "date_published": "2026-06-15T12:16:50-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/06/15/theoretically-it-is-more-than.html", "tags": ["Christian"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/06/08/that-anyone-accomplishes-anything-at.html", "content_html": "That anyone accomplishes anything at all at home after a full day at work is cause to feel impressed.
\n", "date_published": "2026-06-08T21:28:22-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/06/08/that-anyone-accomplishes-anything-at.html", "tags": ["job"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/06/08/good-enough-is-good-enough.html", "content_html": "Good enough is good enough, I thought to myself about my own understanding of the purposes and mechanisms of the Cross of Christ as I leafed through a copy of Denny Weaver’s The Nonviolent Atonement and came face to face with the fact that I’ve probably read well under 1% of what thoughtful people have written on the subject. The fact is, I have a working account, and “of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh” (Ecclesiastes 12:12).
\n", "date_published": "2026-06-08T08:10:55-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/06/08/good-enough-is-good-enough.html", "tags": ["books","Christian"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/06/03/the-pervasive-phenomenological-fact-of.html", "content_html": "Descriptive doxastic pluralism is enough to get this doxastic monist down. Still, I grant its inevitability and can get by. But normative doxastic pluralism beggars belief and grieves me deeply. It is a capitulation to individualism and an erasure of accountability. There is a Truth. I could be wrong about it, and so could you. But that doesn’t mean It doesn’t exist.
\n", "date_published": "2026-06-03T20:11:24-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/06/03/the-pervasive-phenomenological-fact-of.html", "tags": ["Christian"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/05/28/simply-put-we-long-for.html", "content_html": "“Simply put, we long for Judgment Day because Judgment Day is good news.”
\n— Richard Beck, in harmony with the second half of my “I look forward to seeing You” sermon, which is itself a knowing echo of the third chapter of Dale Allison’s winsome, thoughtful Night Comes, entitled “Judgment and Partiality,” where he writes, “We’re not coherent when we applaud justice and jeer judgment.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-28T08:41:12-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/05/28/simply-put-we-long-for.html", "tags": ["Christian","quotations","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/05/24/just-watched-there-will-be.html", "content_html": "Just watched: There Will Be Blood (2007), written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. In an epic cage match between capitalist rapacity and religious charlatanry, who wins? Duh. Do we need to ask?
\nAs much a pleasure it is to watch Daniel Day-Lewis do anything, including his all-time-great villain work here, I found myself unable to fully get over his impersonation of Hugo Weaving doing an American accent. And the sheer relentlessness of his character’s misanthropy, with neither origin story nor heroic counterweight, left me with no one to root for and thus no love for this movie. Plus, Jonny Greenwood’s score is distracting.
\nLike Kane in the last century, surely we’ve been misled to regard this film as one of the greatest of the 21st. It’s not even one of the greatest films I’ve seen about greed this century. (No Country for Old Men rightly beat it at the 2008 Academy Awards.) Give me Rian Johnson for savvier filmic critique of avarice or religion.
\nI don’t normally write negative reviews—what’s the point?—but the overpraise for this one almost demands it. I think maybe people just love them a good, scenery-chewing milkshake monologue. (Please do count me among them.)
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-24T14:52:21-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/05/24/just-watched-there-will-be.html", "tags": ["film \u0026 tv"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/05/23/the-key-to-being-interpersonally.html", "content_html": "The key to being interpersonally curious is this: “In humility of mind, regard others as more important than yourselves” (Philippians 2:3).
\n", "date_published": "2026-05-23T06:45:17-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/05/23/the-key-to-being-interpersonally.html", "tags": ["Christian","quotations","virtue","love"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/20/just-watched-charade-having-these.html", "content_html": "Just watched: Charade (1963). Having these two all-time most charming American film icons together on the same silver screen would likely have been enough to qualify this thriller-comedy-romance as a classic. Yet here they have at their disposal not only their own abundant charisma and sense of timing, but also a smart script, Henry Mancini, the City of Lights, and Givenchy. Not to mention directorial sparklemeister (né dancer, then choreographer) Stanley Donen, whose feel for space and staging shows up in every shot. Top-five classic Hollywood magic stuff. A parable of courtship as spycraft and of the trust pitfalls of love.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-20T13:43:18-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/20/just-watched-charade-having-these.html", "tags": ["film \u0026 tv","marriage"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/20/i-thought-last-time-was.html", "content_html": "I thought last time was the last time
\nBut you did it again?
\nI told you if you did it
\nThat would be the end ✏️ 🎤 🎵
If everyone has everything
\nThen nobody has anyone ✏️ 🎤 🎵
Just finished reading: The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011) by James H. Cone.\nDr. Cone makes it hard to deny that (1) many 19th- and 20th-century African-American Christians saw—nay, experienced and made pastoral use of—the remarkable congruencies between the cross of Christ and the lynching tree, and that (2) most white Christians, including our best theologians, were and still are blind to the same.
\nUntil I read this book, I myself was one such white Christian. And upon my being enlightened by Cone’s strong voice and ample evidence, those congruencies tempted me to say that my entire thoughtcastle on the Cross is an abstract sham.
\nBut then, there is one incongruence between the cross of Christ and the lynching tree that Cone conspicuously fails to mention: Unlike African Americans, Jesus willingly subjected Himself to His lynching at the behest of the Father. He is not only the lamb of God. He is also our highest priest.
\nAnd that makes a world of difference. If you think Jesus was crucified against His will, then the best thing you can say about His crucifixion is that died a martyr for His own teachings and popularity—which is precisely all that Cone, not to mention most theologically liberal Christians I’ve met, seem to be saying about the Cross. In doing so, you brush aside a mountain of scriptural claim that there’s more to it than that and thus evacuate the Cross of much of its salvific power. Evacuate it or perhaps, as Cone hand-wavingly and unhelpfully does, render it “a mystery.” If I have one theological pet peeve, it’s calling answers to theological questions “mysteries” without even trying to see if there’s anything more to be said. (Okay, that’s just one of of my…many theological pet peeves.)
\nHence, despite this book’s first-place win in the Catholic Press Association’s Theology category, there’s barely any theology in it. It’s a Religious Studies book rather than a Theology book. And what theology there is in it is no theology of the Cross; instead, it’s a theology 101 of the Resurrection: Since God raised the crucified Jesus from the dead, then God will raise us from the dead, and hence our suffering becomes sufferable.
\nA sound, welcome, life-changing theological conclusion, to be sure. And as a Religious Studies book, this book was worthwhile: Reading the Jesus- and lynching-related quotations from Hughes, King, Wright, Du Bois, Ellison, Wells, Hamer, and several bluesmen was truly enlightening, and I’m grateful for it.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-12T10:00:55-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/12/just-finished-reading-the-cross.html", "tags": ["books","Christian"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/09/enjoying-the-company-of-other.html", "content_html": "Enjoying the company of other people is the best stress relief.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-09T09:28:36-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/09/enjoying-the-company-of-other.html", "tags": ["virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/08/following-jesus-should-mean-not.html", "content_html": "Following Jesus should mean not only that you should do things in a Jesusy way, but also that you should do Jesusy things.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-08T11:07:19-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/08/following-jesus-should-mean-not.html", "tags": ["Christian","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/07/with-strength-training-on-a.html", "content_html": "With strength training on a two-week hold that ends Friday, listening to new music an activity for which I’ve recently developed a disorienting aversion, and sleeping continuing to include at least three wakeups every night, life feels more improvvy now. These circumstances are mildly destabilizing. I feel like I’m wobbling.
\nBut as of last night, these circumstances are also invigorating. The fact is, if I’m capable of RDLing nearly 380 lb after five hours of sleep, I’m capable of being my joyfully intense self in the whole of life regardless of how much sleep I’ve gotten, regardless of whether there’s a plan for the day, regardless whether I feel “on top of things.”
\nI’m finally beginning to grasp what some work colleagues probably meant last year or the year before when they said that I need to learn to “lead through ambiguity”: It means that historically, I always want to preplan and then follow the plan, that I never want to make decisions on the fly about how to spend my time—and that as a result, I’m inflexible, overly conservative, and prone to spend too much time engineering my time.
\nThat feels like it is changing. And despite the disorientation, I’m finding that it’s actually kind of fun to have to make decisions on the fly.
\nI’ll likely still press for clarity and plans, especially for things like prayer and exercise, anchors of time and health which are so easily cast off, but clarity does not I always have to have a written plan, nor that I ought not stop everything in the absence of a plan just so I can make one.
\nLet me be like Abraham and just go.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-07T09:06:05-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/07/with-strength-training-on-a.html", "tags": ["tech tips \u0026 self management","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/05/in-progressive-and-evangelical-circles.html", "content_html": "In progressive and evangelical circles alike, I hear so much emphasis on the disillusionment of the Crucifixion and the joyous surprise of the Resurrection that it’s easy to forget that crucifixion and resurrection were both part of The Plan. Jesus purposely reentered Jerusalem and provoked the authorities knowing it would lead to His trial and execution. He withheld any exercise of power to liberate Himself from that excruciation. And He did this having said repeatedly that He’d come out alive a few days later. We miss some good theology and soteriology if we miss this. Let’s not be like the disciples.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-05T17:28:15-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/05/in-progressive-and-evangelical-circles.html", "tags": ["Christian"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/05/for-me-theres-a-problem.html", "content_html": "For me, there’s a problem with calling God our “Parent” instead of our “Father.” Besides being distracting, it breaks down the felt relationality of the analogy: No one I know calls either of their parents individually their “parent.” Calling God “Parent” makes Him alien.
\nYou might say that God is alien, and that calling things as they are is good. I grant the point. Yet I say that more than that, calling God “Parent,” before foregrounding any actual theological point, foregrounds the supposed sensitivity of the speaker to other people’s theological hang-ups. That’s its purpose.
\nAnd even though it does highlight the theological fact of God’s non-sexed alienness and thus can be said to offer a true good, it does so at the cost of losing the greater good: In so-called progressive churches, it’s more important that we linguistically fortify our relationship with God than that we fortify our understanding of His alienness. I’d rather (and occasionally do) call God “Mother” than “Parent.”
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-05T15:36:28-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/05/for-me-theres-a-problem.html", "tags": ["Christian","language \u0026 communication"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/03/fundamentally-the-cross-of-christ.html", "content_html": "Fundamentally, the Cross of Christ screams two things:
\nIgnore either at your moral peril.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-03T14:29:02-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/03/fundamentally-the-cross-of-christ.html", "tags": ["Christian"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/01/just-finished-reading-humble-inquiry.html", "content_html": "Just finished reading: Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (2025; originally 2013) by Edgar & Peter Schein. Like so many business books, this would’ve made, to borrow an idea from Carla, a much better pamphlet—a virtuous pamphlet, to be clear—than it does a book. But then, you can’t sell a pamphlet for $24.95. Still, spending a few hours hearing the phrase “humble inquiry” repeated hundreds of times can’t have been bad for me, master of the overconfident statement.
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T17:00:00-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/01/just-finished-reading-humble-inquiry.html", "tags": ["books","virtue","job"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/04/01/when-i-claim-to-be.html", "content_html": "When I claim to be Anglophile, what it seems to me today to mean more than anything else is that I deeply enjoy some of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Not just the evergreen chestnuts The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, either. If you were to translate the electrical impulses of my heart into sound, you would hear those, yes, along with most of his nine symphonies, at least one song cycle, some incidental music, and Job: A Masque for Dancing (maybe his greatest work).
\n", "date_published": "2026-04-01T07:51:42-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/04/01/when-i-claim-to-be.html", "tags": ["music"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/03/28/had-i-written-a-sign.html", "content_html": "Had I written a sign for today’s protest, it would’ve born the boringly straightforward “Our president is a capricious, narcissistic incompetent.” I didn’t. But I did initiate a short, catchier chant: “Dump Trump! He’s a chump!” People seemed to like it.
\nI feel ambivalent about most display protests, including this one, mostly because (1) I’m frequently niggling about the imprecise match between what I think and what I hear and read other participants thinking (e.g., for me, it’s “No kings but Jesus”), and (2) I harbor doubts about their efficacy and thus fear that they sap energy that’d be otherwise and better deployed toward direct action and participation in governance itself. I’m probably wrong about that second reason.
\nRegardless, it was moderately fun.
\nNo kings but Jesus.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-28T16:20:45-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/03/28/had-i-written-a-sign.html", "tags": ["local","language \u0026 communication"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/03/22/just-rewatched-with-sully-who.html", "content_html": "Just rewatched (with Sully, who hadn’t seen it yet): The Shawshank Redemption (1994), written and directed by Frank Darabont and based on a short story by Stephen King. Excellent, chockablock with virtue (moral, thespian, and filmic) and vice (mostly moral), yet misses being a must-see because it crawls through a river of shit and comes out clean. Darabont directing is like Rubin producing: Unambiguous, transparent, safe. Like Capra with cusswords.
\n[edit, 3/25/26]:
\nToday, the part of this movie that gets me most is the following lines from Brooks’ letter:
\n\n\nI can’t believe how fast things move on the outside. I saw an automobile once when I was a kid, but now they’re everywhere. The world went and got itself in a big damn hurry.
\n
Rage, rage against the dying of The Life. Or rage against The Machine. Or something like that.
\n\n\n", "date_published": "2026-03-22T08:19:47-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/03/22/just-rewatched-with-sully-who.html", "tags": ["film \u0026 tv","virtue"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/03/21/im-actually-not-that-funny.html", "content_html": "Love has a speed. It’s a spiritual speed. It is a different kind of speed from the technological speed to which we are accustomed. It goes on in the depth of our life, whether we notice it or not, at three miles per hour. It is the speed we walk and therefore the speed the love of God walks (Kosuke Koyama, Three Mile an Hour God).
\n
“I’m actually not that funny. I’m just misunderstood.”
\n— Carla
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-21T06:52:54-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/03/21/im-actually-not-that-funny.html", "tags": ["familypants","wife"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/03/19/if-i-am-to-follow.html", "content_html": "If I am to “follow the impulses of [my] heart and the desires of [my] eyes, yet know that God will bring [me] to judgment for all these things” (Ecclesiastes 11:9), how am I to distinguish the impulses and desires that God will judge favorably from those that He will frown upon? If a way already “seems right to [me]” (Proverbs 14:12/16:25), how am I to determine whether it’s the kind whose “end” is “death”? How am I supposed to tell a righteous “desire of my heart” from an unrighteous “desire of the flesh” or “desire of the eyes”?
\nOne rule of thumb is to ask myself, in keeping with my working definition of love, the following question: “To whose importance am I responding?” If the honest answer is “my own,” then I am loving myself, and unless I am a doormat in need of some assertiveness training (which I myself am most verily not), then there’s my clear signpost: WAY OF DEATH.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-19T23:00:36-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/03/19/if-i-am-to-follow.html", "tags": ["Christian","virtue","love"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/03/19/im-about-to-do-my.html", "content_html": "I’m about to do my first ever purposeful deload week in the weight room. The working hypothesis is that a central nervous system kept constantly hot by near-daily high-intensity strength training is the prime suspect for the lightness and shortness of sleep I’ve increasingly been experiencing over the past several years.
\nI feel hopeful. I feel anticipatorily happy for a new balance, a new plateau where intensity and relaxation can coexist, where self-discipline doesn’t crowd out levity, flexibility, and rest, but rather is itself pressed into service to those things.
\nIt’s also making me both grateful and newly hungry for long walks with friends, which I haven’t had enough of lately. That could be the letdown from a week a few weeks back when I had one-on-ones, mostly while walking‚ nearly every day and night. A great week. I remember sleeping better that week. That makes sense: long walks calm the nervous system, and all the more so when they’re shared with a trusted friend and real conversation.
\nWhat I’m most hoping to recover isn’t just sleep. It’s the sharp mind bent toward the good of others that I know I have, but which has felt increasingly unavailable to me under the weight of a subtle and creeping flatness: less verve, less expressiveness, less sharp thinking.
\nMy life has been very good. Thank You, God! But I want to bring the full complement of my internal resources to bear on it. To do that, I’ll need those resources fully back at my disposal. Hopefully, this does the trick.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-19T09:05:50-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/03/19/im-about-to-do-my.html", "tags": ["tech tips \u0026 self management"] }, { "id": "http://scottstilson.micro.blog/2026/03/19/genesis-is-full-of-weird.html", "content_html": "Genesis is full of weird relational episodes with sometimes inscrutable morality. But the lesson of Genesis 20, one of several stories in which, as Marilynne Robinson puts it, “the patriarchs act badly and the pagans act well,” is clear: Do not presume the moral fiber of people whose ethnicity—or, more pointedly, whose metaphysics—are different from yours. I feel disappointed to be feeling the need to say this.
\n", "date_published": "2026-03-19T08:34:22-04:00", "url": "https://scottstilson.blog/2026/03/19/genesis-is-full-of-weird.html", "tags": ["Christian","virtue"] } ] }