Timothy Stoner

IN TREATMENT: Telling a good story well

Posted on 08. Aug, 2009 by Tim Stoner.

In Treatment paints us no rosy picture of triumphalistic Freudian or Jungian therapeutic models vanquishing the insidious and crippling terrors of the inner mind. It is brutally honest at that point. And quite a few others, as well. But, what the show cannot divulge, and I doubt ever could, is the ultimate vanity of a materialist psychotherapy which treats people as machines, or animals, rather than amazingly complex, spiritual beings crafted by a Creator in His own image and likeness.

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An Awful Beauty

Posted on 02. Jul, 2009 by Tim Stoner.

Are we to pretend the bad and the gruesome and the ugly don’t exist? Or is it the task of the Christian artist to show how God is present and or pitches His tent in the middle of the awful? That He is there in the bloody awful terror and loss of starvation, of disease, of war? Is an aspect of our calling to look fiercely and unflinchingly into and through the unbeautiful to expose the mystery of God hidden in the darkness; grace breaking out like a song on the bruised lips of a battered child?

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The God Who Smokes

Posted on 17. Jun, 2009 by Tim Stoner.

My childhood struggle with stuttering and my discovery of the holy, unsentimental love of God kicks starts this autobiographical evaluation of “hot” issues facing thinking Christians. This leads to Velvet Rembrandts: why we don’t get to repaint every theological painting in the attic, then winds around to discussing how God can be Good, but not so Nice or Safe, and how Jesus is both compelling, troubling and heroic. Chapters on sex, and my friendship with a homosexual colleague dying of AIDS lead to pondering the role of art and beauty. I conclude with an honest look at the inevitability of final judgment, and, finally, our inconsolable, not so secret, longing for Father and Home.

Woven throughout is a critique of the basic assumptions and core values of Emergent theology. This is not a diatribe. My goal is to offer a biblical and cultural-current evaluation of its dangerous drift while also celebrating where it gets it right.

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