welcome
I’ve been a seminary student for the last few years and among all the things I’ve learned during this interesting and confusing academic+personal experience, one of the greatest discoveries I have made is that I possess a deep interest in studying how people around my age — what I refer to as the MTV generation — make meaning out of life; within this focus of study I have also recognized a strong desire to connect God’s story with the stories of people like me and my friends. My hope is that today’s emerging adult generation will come to understand faith in Jesus Christ with as much freshness and relevance as the first Christians did a few thousand years ago, but in order for this to happen I think it’s necessary that we understand contemporary culture with as much knowledge as the New Testament writers — not to mention Jesus himself — understood the culture of their day. My faith and the passion I have to help others better understand their own faith is what inspires me to think about and respond to things in the world the way I do.
This blog is a place to share some of my thoughts and reflections on the ways I see God’s activity in the world intersecting with my normal everyday life; and since I’m assuming that I’m more similar to you than not, this blog is also about how God’s story intersects with your story. I would love to say that all my entries will be filled with Scriptural references, quotes from well-known theologians or personal devotional-style writings, but the reality is that my daily life is filled with a lot of stuff that isn’t blatantly religious. I spend many hours each week watching shows like The Real World and The Hills, reading about celebrities in People magazine (or pretending I’m a celebrity while checking my Facebook page), watching random videos on youtube and searching for new music on Myspace and iTunes; and it’s through my encounters with pop-culture “texts” like these that I find intricate and often unexpected intersections between my faith and my life.
While I hope to keep the thoughts expressed on this blog related to issues of faith, more often than not I will be passing on links to articles, posting videos and photographs, or just sharing my thoughts on how I see different things in the world that are not specifically religious or “Christian,” but I will do this from my perspective as a Christian. You can count on reading about my strong interest in sports (especially the Timberwolves and Packers); my fascination with people I consider to be icons of our time (people like Steve Nash, Pete Maravich, Dave Chappelle, Kanye West, Rob Bell and David Crowder, among others); my appreciation of creative expressions of life through various forms of art (especially music, film and photography); my thoughts and reviews on books/movies/music that I have recently read/watched/heard; Chipotle burritos; or other seemingly random things that I find interesting and relevant enough to share with the world wide web community.
I hope my thoughts will challenge, inspire and entertain you, and I invite you to leave comments or email me in response to anything on this site. My prayer is that what is expressed in and through this blog will reflect the faith, hope and love of Jesus Christ with the added flavor of my pop-culture personality.
*For an explanation of the name anewdoxology, read my first post.
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Copyright © Andy Jolivette 2008
If you would like to reproduce content or post links to my blog, please include something to the effect of “I found this on anewdoxology.com” and provide a link to the original source (whether it’s my blog or another site). Basically, don’t jack my thoughts (or anyone else’s) and pretend they’re your own. Thanks.
