Charlie Kondek Writes

This book was very provocative and moving for me. Truthfully, I'd like to re-read it, but I want to get some thoughts "on paper" while it's fresh in my mind. The Jesus I Never Knew is Yancey's ruminations on the life, personhood, teachings, and, most of all, I think, the context of Jesus. In particular, Yancey wants to push back on the assumptions he and other Christians at large make about Jesus as we continue to try to study him and, importantly, follow him. It's not a deconstruction, it's a challenge to our conventional ways of thinking about him. I was struck in the book by how Yancey encourages his readers to contrast the Jesus we have come to know two centuries after his death and Resurrection as the wise, sage-like and revered religious leader and how he was more likely encountered in his own time: unless I'm misreading, more accurately in his day a backwoods hillbilly not taken entirely seriously, at least at first, by the people to whom he mi...

  It first occurred to me there are more than four seasons when I worked in advertising. Part of my job was to plan the digital and social content for our clients, figuring out what those brands should say to its target audiences throughout the year on Facebook, Instagram, in blogs. Sitting at my desk in my office after 5:00, sipping bourbon on ice, I realized that, for me, the year didn’t really begin on January 1. It began on September 5, when my kids went back to school. To me, that was a more significant manifestation of a new year. Sometime after that I learned the traditional Chinese calendar , shared by other Asian nations, has 24 seasons called solar terms, two a month, and that each recognizes a shift in nature, usually related to agriculture. For example, early March is the Awakening of Insects, when those creatures, alerted by spring rains, come out of hibernation. In September, the first transition from summer to autumn is called White Dew, a change in the color and...