My Review of James White’s “The Forgotten Trinity.” ★✩✩✩✩ The writer of “The Forgotten Trinity” strikes me as a someone so content with his own knowledge, and so sure his own views are true, that he can no longer see what he actually writes. His own incoherence no longer activates his logic alarms. He’s like a man decorated with medals who walks nobly onto the stage, oblivious to the clown…
Spiration Sickness
Behold! I’ve started working on Chapter 5 (of 7) of my book “Surprising God.” The Chapter is called: God is One. It’s actually about: • Trinity • Covenant Bonding • Agape Love. Right now I’m slogging through Trinity research (pray for me). While it’s true that I’ve now come to a place in life where…
Juneteenth and the First Black Millionaire
I just finished the book “Prince of Darkness,” about Jeremiah G. Hamilton, America’s first black millionaire. In the early 1800s he made a great deal of money scamming insurance companies—especially maritime insurance companies. The racket was simple during those early days of maritime insurance. Insure the cargo for more than its worth, then sink the…
The Stars in Their Places
Good sentences give you fodder for contemplation. I’ve come to adore the writing of Cormac McCarthy this past year. Right now I’m reading “All the Pretty Horses” and I want to share a sentence from that book. The Context John Grady and his pal, Rawlins, were preparing to sleep under the stars after a long…
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Confident Humility:
Becoming Your Full Self Without Becoming Full Of Yourself
"In the spirit of Dallas Willard... Dan addresses one of the most persistent problems that Christians face: Why does our faith in God’s transforming love transform us so little?”
-From the foreword by Greg Boyd, author of Letters From a Skeptic
Almost all self-help books emerge from one of two flawed views of the self, and these mutually exclusive ditches are destructive. The Ditch of Smallness says that people are fundamentally bad and that humanity's greatest spiritual threat is pride. The Ditch of Bigness says the exact opposite: people are fundamentally good, and shame is our greatest danger.
Dan Kent presents a third view, a road between the ditches. He shows how the humility Jesus revealed offers the most accurate and freeing view of the self. Whereas shame and arrogance are dysfunction steroids (making our depression darker, our anxiety tighter, our addictions stickier, and so forth), humility, as Jesus teaches it, counteracts both shame and pride, thereby subverting two major psychological forces that thwart us.
Once we embrace this new way of seeing ourselves--how Jesus sees us--we begin to relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world around us in a way that allows us to overcome a whole host of vices and self-sabotaging behaviors. Furthermore, whereas the ditches both lead to powerlessness and passivity, humility as Jesus teaches it is empowering, fosters proactivity, and serves as a scaffold for true confidence.
Confident Humilty Learning Tools:
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The Bible is largely comprised of stories. What role do stories play in our lives? How can stories change us? Why does God’s word to us come in the form of stories rather than propositions? These are questions that Dan Kent addresses in this sermon.
Back Where We Belong
Dan Kent invites us to see the story of the Bible, summarizing five grand themes that begin in Genesis and are completed in Revelation. In this way, the book of Revelation calls us back to where we belong, even in the midst of a broken world that tries to pull us away.
Foundations of True Flourishing
The concluding chapters of Revelation provide a vision of what it means to flourish. This vision is of a holy city, one that is built around the presence of God. There we discover the ultimate foundation of human flourishing, the meaning of all life.
Study Guides
Daniel Kent (@thatdankent) was born to a 14 year old mother in the humorless tundra of Northern Minnesota. He went to college to figure out if God exists and taught his first college course when he was 25. He wrote his first novel when he was 12 (a nature adventure story, hand-written on 20 sheets of loose-leaf paper and sent off to New York for publication. Unfortunately, the publishing company was "not considering material of this type at this time").
Due to a chronic tendency to underestimate the difficulty of a task, combined with a spirit of stubborn determination, Daniel decided to learn programming. Realizing he was a lousy programmer, he returned to his love of writing. His first book ("The Training of KX12") has been a surprise hit. In 2019, Fortress Press published his best-selling book: Confident Humility: Becoming Your Full Self Without Becoming Full of Yourself.
He is the editor in chief (and occasional contributor) for Greg Boyd's blog ReKnew.org and is the host of the wildly popular podcast: "Greg Boyd: Apologies & Explanations."
