Shannon Costello

I’m always curious about Laura’s faith.  Sometimes she seems to revel in her hatred of Nelly.  There’s a line somewhere about the hot wickedness bubbling up inside her- pretty expressive.  But there is also a certain acknowledgement of the depths of sin.  Laura knows her thoughts are wrong.  In a scene that has lived in [...]

I know.  Must we drag up this topic again.  Sorry in advance.
As a result of cold-weather hiking, I have developed a temporary fascination with lichens and fungi.  And so I’m reading a very entertaining book by a mycologist who occasionally inserts paragraphs mocking Christian Fundamentalists and their views on evolution.
The standard mushrooms that one sees [...]

We all growl like bears

Sometimes my faith gets thin and I break through the crust and find myself in danger of falling, falling…
I have a tendency to imagine conversations with people.  They are generally not healthy conversations.  This one was the standard “have-you-considered-adoption” conversation (not intended to be offensive, of course, and not really considered offensive- I think it [...]

The adults in our small group recently decided that the children should have a little class of their own, instead of playing the entire time.  Last time we met we brought them upstairs to break the news to them.  There was a certain amount of reluctance on their part to leave their games and join [...]

I’ve appropriated another subtitle for this post, this time from a book by E. Luther Copeland. His book deals with the history of an American Protestant denomination. His thesis was extremely intriguing and is not impacted by what I discuss here.
While discussing a fairly controversial subject — women in the church [...]

Someone else described me as “sweet” last week. As far as I am concerned that is blatantly false. I know I am not sweet.
“Sweet” is the sort of word that makes only rare guest appearances in my own speech about others, but I do regularly describe people as “good” or “bad”. And so does the [...]

(That was the subtitle of Arthur Farnsley’s doctoral dissertation, which has little to do with this post. However, some of the ideas the author discusses there are inspiring my thoughts here.)
What you believe is important for what it makes you do. This is one reason why minor doctrinal issues may not be terribly [...]