Scott Stilson

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 09:28:36 -0400

Enjoying the company of other people is the best stress relief.

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:07:19 -0400

Following Jesus should mean not only that you should do things in a Jesusy way, but also that you should do Jesusy things.

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:06:05 -0400

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.

But 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.”

I’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.

That 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.

I’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.

Let me be like Abraham and just go.

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:28:15 -0400

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.

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 15:36:28 -0400

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.

You 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.

And 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.”

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 14:29:02 -0400

Fundamentally, the Cross of Christ screams two things:

We are guilty!
We are forgiven!

Ignore either at your moral peril.

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 07:51:42 -0400

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).

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 16:20:45 -0400

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.

I 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.

Regardless, it was moderately fun.

No kings but Jesus.

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:19:47 -0400

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.

[edit, 3/25/26]:

Today, the part of this movie that gets me most is the following lines from Brooks’ letter:

I 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.

Rage, rage against the dying of The Life. Or rage against The Machine. Or something like that.

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).

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 06:52:54 -0400

“I’m actually not that funny. I’m just misunderstood.”

— Carla

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 23:00:36 -0400

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”?

One 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.

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 09:05:50 -0400

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.

I 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.

It’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.

What 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.

My 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.

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 08:34:22 -0400

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.

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 20:18:19 -0400

Given that “if we ask for anything in agreement with [God’s] will, He listens to us,” and that “if He listens to what we ask, we know that we have received what we asked from him” (1 John 5:14-15), then—from a place of excitement—I’m going to stick to asking Him for what I know is His will and not sweat the rest. Actually, it’s more like going to have a field day asking Him for what I know is His will.

NB: There’s very little that I know to be His will: the growth of the knowledge of Him and the flowering of undisputed goods and virtues, such as wisdom, generosity, and the fruit of the Spirit, are pretty much it. The rest, I might talk with Him about and occasionally make requests about, but I won’t come with an expectation of getting what I want.

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 07:29:52 -0400

We used to idle with each other. Now we idle with our phones.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 21:06:30 -0400

Man does not live by to-do lists alone. But some (like me) die trying.

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 19:12:54 -0400

Just listened to: URGH (2026) by Mandy, Indiana. A jarring, post-industrial noise-rock and noise-techno tour de force straight from the floor in the fifth circle of Hell, with punk déclameuse Valentine Caulfield incanting irony and defiance against “assault, systemic indifference, and the omnipresence of pain, while also insisting on moments of beauty and solidarity.” (Bonus points for skillful misappropriation of scripture to attack Putin in the opening track.)

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:53:07 -0400

Just listened to: Harmonies du soir (2011), a Liszt recital recorded on Decca by the late Nelson Freire, who trades in neither treacle, nor mud, nor exhibitionism. Just music.

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:20:28 -0400

In a discussion of life values in our automobile-centric country, Éa asserted she doesn’t ever want a car and just wants to bike everywhere. But then, she realized this: “But I guess if I don’t ever get a car and I just bike everywhere, I’m not part of the solution; I’m just not part of the problem. So what I need to do…is get a bus!”

Sola gratia: Yes, and…

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 10:26:13 -0400

A friend of mine at UBBC remarked last Sunday that to figure out Paul’s letter to the Romans, you have to “wade through so much Lutheran bullshit.”

I love that phrase, with all apologies to actual Lutherans, who may or may not hold to the biblical interpretation it denotes. The “bullshit” my friend has in view is the idea that somehow, contra James, faith in God without works is alive or is worth something. This friend tends not to like Paul and sees Romans as Paul thinking out loud and thus confusing things. (My friend is not alone in making a remark along those lines.)

In a bid to both correct my friend and the Lutherans he imagines, allow me to say that Paul is plenty clear about this matter and is never, ever saying that faith without works is alive. On the contrary, behold the reasons he puts forward just in Romans alone that God gives us His grace in the Messiah Jesus:

“…through whom we have received grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the Gentiles in behalf of His name” (Romans 1:5).
“[G]race abounded all the more, so that…grace would reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (5:20-21).
“We have been buried with Him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4).
“We know that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin would be rendered powerless, so that we would no longer be enslaved by sin” (6:6).
“But now having been freed from sin and enslaved to God, you derive your benefit, resulting in sanctification, and the outcome, eternal life” (Romans 6:22).
“My brothers and sisters, you also were put to death in regard to the Law through the body of Christ, so that you might belong to another, to Him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God" (Romans 7:4).
“You…have been shown mercy…oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God!…therefore…present your bodies as a living and holy sacrifice acceptable to God” (Romans 11:30,33; 12:1).
“[N]ot one of us lives for himself, and not one dies for himself; for if we live, we live for the Lord, or if we die, we die for the Lord; therefore whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living" (14:7-9).
“…according to the revelation of the mystery which has been kept secret for long ages past, but now has been disclosed, and through the Scriptures of the prophets, in accordance with the commandment of the eternal God, has been made known to all the nations, leading to obedience of faith” (Romans 16:25-26).

And in Paul’s other correspondence:

“For you have been bought for a price: therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:20).
“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin in our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).
“[T]he love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that those who live would no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose on their behalf” (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).
“…who gave Himself for our sins so that He might rescue us from this present evil age” (Galatians 1:4).
“[What] counts [is] faith working through love” (Galatians 5:6).
“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8-10).
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all people, instructing us to deny ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly, righteously, and in a godly manner in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed, and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession, eager for good deeds” (Titus 2:11-14).

What is the relationship that Paul wants us to understand between grace, faith, and good works? The words I bolded above telegraph the answer: We are saved by God’s grace (i.e., gift) through our faith (i.e., through believing Him about His gift or through Jesus’ faithfulness—or both) so that we do good works.

(See also the Paul-adjacent Hebrews 9:14 and 1 Peter 2:21-25, not to mention the liters of ink Paul spills simply telling Jesus-followers how to act and what to do.)

James may have be arguing with Paul’s hearers, including many Lutherans, Calvinists and evangelicals among us today, but he is not arguing with Paul himself. According to Paul, we can be—no, ought to be—both amazed at God’s grace and therefore diligent to pay God back. God’s grace is freely, undeservedly, surprisingly, extravagantly, and purely benevolently given and it obligates us to grateful good works in response.

In the above, I’m just repeating an important takeaway from John M. G. Barclay’s Paul and the Gift or its lay reduction Paul and the Power of Grace, whose thesis I had Gemini reduce and polemicize as follows:

“Modern Christianity has fundamentally misunderstood the nature of ‘grace’ by projecting a modern, Western, ‘no-strings-attached’ fantasy onto the ancient world. Furthermore, modern scholars have flattened the explosive nature of Paul’s theology. God’s grace is undeniably free, but it is entirely obligatory; it requires a radical return, and its distribution shattered every existing Jewish and Roman system of social worth.”

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:37:00 -0400

Carla: What is going on here?
Sully: What? Oh, film development and a root beer float.

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 16:00:00 -0400

Here’s a snippet of mine that just appeared in UBBC’s wilderness-themed Lenten devotional series:

In October 2014, I stumbled into a wilderness I hadn’t packed for. After decades of secure faith, I was suddenly struck by what I described at the time as “acute, soul-threatening” doubt. I looked for God, and for the first time, found only silence. I wrestled with the problem of evil, the problem divine hiddenness, and the problem of unanswered prayer, losing sleep and peace in the process.

But that wilderness wasn’t just a place of deprivation; it was a place of transformation. In that dry season, when my intellectual certainty withered, something new began to grow. Drought-tolerant virtues emerged from the dust of my doubt:

empathy (my uncertainty made me less dogmatic and more empathetic toward others),
action orientation (“for in Christ Jesus…the only thing that counts is faith working through love”),
metaphysical flexibility,
humility, and even
lightheartedness.

Above all, I discovered that faith isn’t a feeling of certainty, but a decision of allegiance. And I have decided to follow Jesus.

(I haven’t since returned to my homelands of certainty, and probably never will. But thankfully, He has given me practicable confidence more than enough to carry on.)

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 21:31:48 -0400

Just listened to: Days of Ash (2026) by U2. Their most politically charged release in over forty years (or maybe ever), and their first release in over twenty years that I’ve willingly listened to front-to-back more than once. Sonically, it’s sure U2, alright. Lyrically, too—and while in some past U2 offerings that’s been a liability, here their earnest on-the-noseness is endearing instead of cringeworthy, probably because of the smack-dab timing of the release. Lent Rocks, I guess. And the times they are a’crazy. Hear the word of the Lord according to Bono. Forgive us, O Lord, for we have sinned.

Sat, 28 Feb 2026 07:50:18 -0400

Everything new is old (again) ✏️ 🎤 🎵

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 23:19:23 -0400

After all that rumination on joy and on how to enact the less familiar modes of love I wish to practice, it turns out that for me for now, at least, the secret is this: “Whoever wants to preserve his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will preserve it” (Mark 8:35; see also Matthew, Luke, and John). (Let the record show that this illumination came to me yesterday while on a walk around Mount Nittany Middle School as I waited for Éa’s futsal tournament to begin—at least eighteen hours before I heard it in the scripture readings at church this morning. Thus says the Lord.)

What I mean is that over roughly the past ten years, in response to what I think can be safely summed up as social acceleration, I have grown to guard my attention and energies more and more in an attempt to preserve and optimize them for the subset of life’s overabundant opportunities that happens to make it onto my lists (to-dos, goals, albums to hear, and movies to watch).

I suppose that alone isn’t the problem. However, me being me, two problems arise:

Some of the items that make it onto my lists are mere “things that are on the earth” instead of “things that are above,” and
Zealotry for my lists closes me off to novel opportunities, whether presented by impulse (my own or others’), emergent or newly revealed needs and desires (my own or others’), or invitations (God’s or others’). I often respond to invitations as if they are intrusions rather than “dancing lessons from God.”

I’m like a National Park Service employee who has decided it’s my desire or my responsibility to work on a path a hundred yards from the rim of Grand Canyon, where I often find myself working alone, and every single time a colleague closer to the rim invites me to come see what they see or to work alongside them on a path that descends into the canyon, I roll my eyes and shout grumpily, “Can’t you see I’m working?!” Some of the time, I go ahead and join them, but always with my path on my mind.

Since I claim to follow Jesus, such cranky insularity is an invalid option, and it forfeits my soul to keep trying it. Most unsettling among its effects is that I find myself growing stony: both unsympathetic and mildly anhedonic. Eesh! Let me be done with that. And yes, let me come see that vista you keep trying to get me to come see.