Monday Office Hours

The inaugural issue is here—and we're discussing Christian identity! [3/17/25]

Good day, friend! It’s Monday. Today’s post represents the inaugural edition of my Monday Office Hours for paid subscribers to the Low-Level Theologian. Thank you for being such gracious supporters of this project and community. The goal of these Monday Office Hour offerings is to provide you with “going deeper” content and thinking beyond the Thursday Devotionals. As warned, what you’ll experience in these Monday posts is a bit more “teachy” and academic in tone and content. It will model what happens in most Office Hour appointments at Bushnell University, where I teach. I will make it my goal to offer thoughtful responses to what I hear students, parishioners, or readers ask about faithfulness to Jesus in our complex moment of time.

I welcome your questions! You are strongly invited, as part of this community, to ask your own questions in the comment section at the bottom of these posts. I will likely respond to them in the coming weeks. You can help shape the conversations that are to come!

For the next three weeks, I will be responding to a grab bag of questions I’ve been receiving lately on the topic of identity from a Christian perspective. Identity was, if you can remember, the 2015 Dictionary.com word of the year. As we all know, the idea of one’s identity has shaped much of the cultural landscape along political, sexual, gender, national, cultural, and ethnic lines. I’ll do my best to address some of the core questions I’ve been asked about this topic.

Enjoy!

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I’ve been trying to change within myself a particularly infuriating character flaw that I can’t seem to shake. No matter what I do to strive for behavior change, it seems part of who I am. I can’t run from this. What can I do?

What a fabulous—albeit painful—question. Underneath it lay (I assume) years of struggle, frustration, and seasons of ups and downs. A word of empathy and compassion are the first words needed. Not one of us who has sought to follow Jesus for years is immune to experiencing the same thing and the frustrations that come with it. Still, you ask a critical question: how can I change my life to better reflect what God desires in me?