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Preaching Podcasts

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Occasionally I get asked by someone at church to recommend podcasts. (Someone just asked last week, which is the reason for this post). The difficulty in answering is that while I listen to podcasts regularly, I don’t listen to any religious podcasts. Here are two reasons why:

  • I tend to get plenty of inspiration from books I read and conversations that I have. I don’t find myself longing for more religious talk.
  • A couple years ago, I regularly listened to a podcast from a famous pastor. One Sunday, as I was teaching, I found myself talking like the famous pastor. And, I thought, “I don’t want to copy someone else, I need to work at being the best “charlie” I can be, not an imitation of some famous teacher.” So, I stopped listening regularly to other preachers.

So, I’m looking for some help. Do you listen to any religious podcasts? Would you recommend any? Why or why not?

Oh – and in case you’re curious – my Top 5 Podcasts. I listen to them in the following order, mostly because those at the top of the list are generally more timely.

  1. On the Media
  2. NPR’s Planet Money
  3. This American Life
  4. Freakonomics Podcast
  5. WNYC’s RadioLab

I’m starting to listen to The Splendid Table more often, so it gets an honorable mention.

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Where does “authority” live?

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Sometimes it seems that there’s a convergence of ideas – a conversation with a person, something read in a book, an off-handed comment, a blog article – that all pulling at the same thread. Here’s an idea that has been a thread recently in my interactions…

Someone told me of their conversation with a conservative Bible college professor who remarked that while his generation was asking, “how do we know that the Bible is authoritative,” today’s students don’t seem to be interested in that question anymore. Instead they’re interested in “what does it mean?”

In a conversation with friends, we were talking about today’s youth and their relationship to authority. In the course of our conversation we noted the success of movements like The Tea Party and Anonymous that seem to thrive precisely because they lack an authority structure.

I watched a discussion between two theologians where one was trying to pin the other down on a particular issue and it’s relationship to the Bible. The other was appealing to the “world as it is” as a source of authority.

After my Sunday school class, where I’m facilitating discussions about Mark Noll’s Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of the Church, someone framed the Protestant Reformation as the movement from a Pope as the ultimate authority to a “paper pope” (the Bible”) as the ultimate authority. They then wondered what our authority should be today.

In the same class we noted that prior to the Reformation, issues were simpler – the church told you the “orthodox” position. Since the Reformation, you find a seemingly endless interpretations represented among the various denominations, splits and subgroups, leading some to cynically conclude that post-reformation, the authority is simply what I see in the text.

In my Protestant tradition that I come from, our standard doctrinal formation is that the Bible is the ultimate authority in everything. And that’s intended to end of the discussion. But, I’m not sure that it really answers the question at all, because the Bible is always interpreted by someone granted authority – that could be a local church that see their pastor as authoritative, or a denomination, or maybe even something a little bit less structured. And it seems that when someone says “the Bible is the ultimate authority,” what they really mean is “my interpretation is the ultimate authority.”

To be perfectly clear – I’m not saying “down with the Bible,” or anything close to that. What I’m asking is that in a world where I can find a wide-range of interpretations to any given text, how does one decide what’s authoritative?

So, here’s a series of questions:

  • What should be our authority today? (I’m asking this as a Christian, but if you want to answer from another viewpoint, that’s great.)
  • If “the Bible” – whose interpretation is authoritative?
  • Is having an authority even necessary – can we live in a “Tea Party / Anonymous” kind of way? That might be good for group, but does that work for an individual, or is that, in the end, just relativism – I do what I want to do?
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My First Marathon

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A year-and-a-half ago something in me shifted – a convergence of events, influences, boiling frustrations, cycles of success-failure-shame and eventually a hard conversation with my wife, and I realized at 37 that it was time to start thinking about my health in serious ways. Many of you have seen, heard or read me talk about my journey, but the short version is this: In the last 18 months I’ve lost nearly 70 pounds and somewhere along the way I became a runner.

In 2012 I ran a 15k, 10k, a mini-triathlon and found myself doing runs up to 12 miles pretty regularly. And I started whispering to myself, “maybe a marathon.” On New Year’s Eve a price discount deadline was approaching for the Christie Clinic Illinois Marathon in Champaign. I was cooking with a friend at his house and people were coming soon, and Jennifer called my bluff and signed me up.

[Gulp]

After a cold winter of running in snow, wind, sub-freezing temperatures (as low as 6 degrees!), darkness, sleet and cold spring rains; after running through soreness in my knee in March, a nasty cold 2 weeks before the race and more days than I could count where I really didn’t want to run, I finished my first marathon last Saturday. I’ve been asked a lot of questions over the past week, so this is my attempt to answer some of those questions and process my experience for you all! Thanks for all your encouragement and kind words leading up to this! Continue reading →