God: “Truth is self-love that sets you free and enables you to see your sin as an opportunity to talk with Me about why you sin so we can have conversations like this one and walk further down life’s path together. This is My heart. This is discipleship.”

This poem was inspired by my friend and pastor, Matt Whitlock, and his sermon on “The Silently Simple Life.”

From the dark abyss of suffering was born my book Biblical Ethics. Five years ago, the last thing on my mind was writing a book on how to live a morally happy, flourishing life. I was deep in the throes of a PhD program when the walls of my intellectual ivory tower came crashing down….

A strictly Darwinian process of evolution is insufficient to account for a universal principle such as the pursuit of happiness. Admittedly, natural selection as an unguided (“blind”) and purposeless process may explain why human beings seek to survive, but it fails to explain why we seek to thrive. Human flourishing seems superfluous to the individuals…

“Collaboration between theology and philosophy is necessary because philosophy alone cannot provide a basis for the understanding of the unity of the perception of meaning, the historical roots of intellectual life.” Pannenberg, Philosophy of Science and Theology, 13.

“After years of probing the spectacular mysteries of the universe, I have been led to a firm belief in the existence of God. The grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm my belief in the certainty of a creator. I just cannot envision this whole Universe coming into being without something like divine will….