This is Faith in Play #81: The Bland Mind, for August 2024. I’m going to confess up front that this thought came from a typo: I was studying in the Synoptics about Jesus healing a blind man, and I mistyped bland for blind. I corrected it immediately, but it left me wondering, couldn’t Jesus heal … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #80: Synchronized, for July 2024. About two years ago we posted Faith in Play #53: Synchronicity. This is a related but distinct notion. Now four decades ago when I was a DJ on one of the then few contemporary Christian radio stations in the world I noticed something peculiar. Fairly … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #79: Mind, for June 2024. I often receive questions from readers in comments or by e-mail, on a wide range of subjects. Recently a girl (woman?) wrote about a concern she has related to role playing games: should we be filling our minds with these thoughts and images? Or, as … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #78: Stakes, for May 2024. In my book Why I Believe I wrote, “Tests are merely games, and if you go into them thinking of them as games and relax and enjoy playing, you will perform better. What makes people nervous is not the game but the stakes.” I had … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #77: Animals, for April 2024. We’ve talked about animals before. Faith and Gaming: Animals discussed their perceptions of reality in the context of whether they were praising God outside our knowledge, and last year RPG-ology #65: Dog (a recovered Game Ideas Unlimited article) discussed how animals think, as a pointer … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #76: Lineage, for March 2024. Lineage–the chain of ancestry from father to son over generations–is a very significant theme in the Bible, more so than even many serious students of the Bible realize. We recognize that the Old Testament is laced with family records covering centuries, and that in the … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #75: Tourette’s, for February 2024. Late in the twentieth century there was a fair amount of publicity given to a neurological disorder known as Tourette’s Syndrome. Sufferers cursed and swore uncontrollably and seemingly randomly, usually with a physical tic as they did. It was embarrassing and awkward. I have a … [Read more…]
2023 has been a rough year for those of us who oversee the posts on the Christian Gamers Guild website. There were a few submissions from contributing authors which are languishing on hard drives and in e-mail boxes awaiting the attention of an editor, but the only articles that actually made it to the web … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #74: Preparation, for January 2024. For most of us, Christmas is over. When I was a boy, our tree and decorations went up shortly after Thanksgiving, and on New Year’s Day everything came down and was packed away, the tree burned in the fireplace as part of the New Year … [Read more…]
This is Faith in Play #73: Pilgrimage, for December 2023. Referees are frequently looking for adventure ideas, and there are a lot of stock options–tip from a stranger, retrieval or rescue mission, strange map. Among the ones commonly used is the caravan guards, that the player characters are hired to travel with a merchant and … [Read more…]