Blog Plug: Alden Swan

I stumbled across this blog while searching for information on Orthodoxy and Universalism, which the author posts here. I remembered the look-and-feel as a blog I’d seen before, but this time, I got sucked in. He’s got a diversity of interesting articles across all sorts of subjects related to faith.

I could not stop finding reasons to plug this blog. I concurred immediately with the blog’s subtitle: “free speech, critical thinking, and really good coffee!” Alden is co-author of the book The Gospel Uncensored. He plays banjo, and I almost always get along with musicians. The overall tone—at least of what I’ve read thus far—is one of genuine inquisition and desire for facts. Reading various posts, I was immediately aware of his distaste for the whole “my personal religion” deal. For example, here’s a thought-provoking post on contemporary worship in modern churches. Elsewhere, he discusses issues of canon. I also enjoyed Hermeneutics and Heretics, and I feel the opening paragraph is worth duplication here:

One of the problems that we have, and why some atheists and other forms of non-believers find Christianity nuts, is that so many of us read the Bible in ways that allow us to make it say whatever we want. Thus, we have those committed to a life of poverty, and also those committed to material wealth; we have legalists and antinomians, liberal pacifists and fundamentalist war-mongers, and the list goes on. Many non-Christians don’t understand that when Pat Robertson proclaims a natural disaster as punishment from God, or when Oral Roberts sees a 900 foot Jesus, they aren’t speaking for the rest of us. This individualized, subjective (and dare I say postmodern?) reading of the Bible is, at the very least, setting a bad example for non-Christians who are trying to make sense out of what we believe (or are supposed to believe).

So there you have it. Check him out via my “Links & Blogs” list, or directly at http://aldenswan.com