ChrisHubbs.com

Mon, 08 Jun 2026 20:24:00 -0500

This just in: #WNBA officiating is still hot garbage.

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 17:00:28 -0500

2026 Reads: The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor 📚

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 11:35:19 -0500

Ran the 10k this morning as a part of the Cedar Rapids Marathon Weekend. 21st overall, first in my age group, and improved my PR by more than 3 minutes!

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 09:48:18 -0500

2026 Reads: God’s Homecoming by N. T. Wright 📚

Wright’s prose is clear as ever, his theology fine, but he leaves some big gaps that leave me less than satisfied overall.

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 17:47:56 -0500

The Cubs disaster continues…

sports.apple.com/event/umc…

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 14:48:18 -0500

2026 Reads: A Systematic Theology of Love - God and Creation by Thomas Oord 📚

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 22:12:57 -0500

The #Cubs are such a disaster. For two weeks the offense couldn’t manage to score. Tonight they finally score a few runs and the bullpen gives up 2 in the 8th and one in the 10th, and the Cubs can’t plate a run from 3rd with one out in the bottom of the 10th. Miserable. #MLB

A Little More on Reconstruction

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 20:24:00 -0500

In my last post I talked in a round-about way about reconstruction. My post garnered a few comments from friends saying that reconstruction was a new idea to them, so perhaps it’s worth a few more thoughts.

To be able to talk about what I mean by reconstruction it’s probably best to start by sketching what I mean by deconstruction. The philosophers would tell us that the term properly is about examining the relationship between text and meaning. At least, that’s what Wikipedia tells me. I’m not a philosopher.

But in ex-evangelical circles, the term deconstruction has been used popularly to describe the disassembly of the rigid belief structure and thought framework that evangelicalism catechizes. Evangelical theologians often stress that questioning one belief or another is a “slippery slope”, and warn that if you remove one piece, the whole framework of belief is likely to come down like a Jengatower. While this warning is usually intended to keep evangelicals aligned with the particulars of fundamental belief, it can end up having the reverse effect. Once a questioner begins to accept, say, that Genesis 1-2 can be understood less than literally, and that the cosmos might actually be older than, say, 10,000 years, the dam has broken, and any number of other scriptural understandings become possible.

The “deconstruction” process of that dam breaking free usually comes with anger, with a sense of being unmoored, with a lot of questions about what even is real and true, about who or what can be trusted. That process is necessary, will look different for everyone, and will take some time. In my own experience, the anger provided the energy I needed to finally take the steps to break away from the system that had been my whole life. Anger as I began to understand how words and texts were manipulated; anger at how complex, nuanced, millennia-long debates were portrayed as simple, settled, “plain” truths; anger realizing how systems had been carefully constructed to protect hypocritical and sinful leaders at the expense of the people in the pews. I believe that anger is righteous, closer to the heart of God for God’s people than any of that fundamentalist teaching. I suspect every deconstructor goes through a “burn it all down” phase. Some for a very long time.

But you can’t really flourish while living in perpetual anger. Sooner or later you need to move on from it. That doesn’t need to mean coming to accept the broken system you left. It might not mean coming back to Christianity at all. But we still have a need for the things that religion typically provides: things like community, an anchor for a system of ethics, a framework to think about the Big Questions of life. And that’s where this idea I think of as reconstruction comes in. Because while I definitely had a phase where I wanted to burn it all down, I don’t want to live in the ash pile forever.

After a lot of thought and reading and study, for me right now this reconstruction is turning out to look like an Episcopalian flavor of Christianity, with a strong dose of Universalism mixed in. I’m still working it out as I go, but in this vein of a faith tradition I have found a community anchored in the strong assurance of God’s love and strongly committed to upholding the dignity of all people by loving them in God’s example and power. Crucially, this community is secure enough in that love that the hard questions are welcome. No one is afraid that pulling on a particular Jenga block of belief is going to bring God’s love tumbling down.

It can be easy for those of us trained in fundamentalism to hold just as rigidly and fundamentalist-ly to our new belief system as our old one. But reconstruction should be dynamic. Once you’re freed from the fear that has maintained that rigid structure, you can breathe, and read, and think, and pray, and discuss, and change. And that should be an ongoing process. My beliefs today aren’t the same as they were 5 years ago, much less 10 years ago. And I hope that 5 years from now I can look back and see that they have continued to evolve. Building on the foundation of God’s love for me and God’s call for me to love my neighbor, reconstruction can be a lifelong creative exploration and delight.

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 13:43:43 -0500

I dream about something like this happening when I’m in the audience. So cool.

www.nytimes.com/2026/06/0…

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:16:16 -0500

What a lovely morning for a run! I’m happy with those reverse splits, too. Dialing it in this week for a 10k race on Sunday.

Sun, 31 May 2026 09:09:09 -0500

Back in early April we were looking at our calendar and saying “we just have to make it through May”. And today we have. I’ve been home for roughly 2 of the last 5 weeks and made 3 separate west coast trips. We now have two full weeks of the family and just the family at home. Thankful.

Sat, 30 May 2026 12:13:51 -0500

2026 Reads: Beyond the Empire by K. B. Wagers 📚

Books 2 and 3 could’ve used some significant editing, but they were still fun.

Reconstructing

Fri, 29 May 2026 10:30:43 -0500

I’ve got some threads to weave together here, and I’m not sure as I start just how they’ll go, but hey, you gotta start somewhere, right?

Thread One

The first thread is the experience of listening to the live Rich Mullins tribute concert recording that I wrote about earlier this week. To listen to it was an intense experience. While I didn’t break down in tears on the airplane during the listen, I did choke up multiple times. And where it got me wasn’t so much in my favorite songs; where it got me was in the moments where the audience (or, let’s call them the congregation) entered the mix and sang along. 2300 of us there in the pews at the Ryman simply knew the songs and the notes, and when the opportunity arose, there we were. The bridge in “Calling Out Your Name”. The chorus on Andrew Peterson’s “The Good Confession”. The call and response on “I See You”. The whole freaking chorus of “Step By Step”. Amazing, glorious music reverberating through the timbers of an old Nashville church.

A Brief Interlude

I’ve heard it said that if you want to put a finger on the things that are really important to you, the ones where you say yes, this is one of the important things I am built to do and should be devoting my life energy toward, look for where the tears and emotion come easily. And for me it’s really only one thing, and that one thing is people making music together. Not that I dislike being a solo musician. But where my heart gets grabbed before I even have a chance to think is group music - really, it’s people singing together. Musical theater. Audience participation with a band at a concert. Several people singing in harmony around a piano or guitar. Were I to sit down with you right now and just describe the experience at the end of the Ragamuffin concert of the congregation going from Step By Step into an acapella singing of the Doxology I would be choking up just verbalizing the memory. Whatever’s going on back deep in me, it’s that strong.

Thread Two

The next thread to pull on is the combination of my painful departure from the evangelical church and my strong reluctance since then to sit down at the piano and play and sing songs. I’ve been playing the piano and singing ever since I was old enough to play the piano. Accompanying family hymn singing when I was just learning to sight read, playing for church, teaching myself how to play songs that I liked off the radio. Learning all of the Liturgy, Legacy album after getting the sheet music for it. In my adulthood that primarily translated into leading worship at my evangelical churches. I was very good at it. And I loved it. Well, not all of the politics of it and not the endless rehearsals. But when things were really on? When the band is tight and the songs are good and the congregation is responsive? There’s nothing like it in the world. Church music was largely my life outside of work and family since college. And in 2020 when we left the evangelical church that all got left behind. And I’ve barely sat down and played and sang a song since.

It’s not that I don’t want to sing songs. I mean, there are some songs that I definitely couldn’t in good conscience sing any more. Rotten theology, manipulative musical choices, songwriters who have turned out to be better Nationalists than they are Christians… but there are still songs that I could want to sing. But since 2020 I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit down and try. It’s like it’s still too raw to be able to handle it. Could I make it through a song without just breaking down and weeping for reasons I can’t even articulate? Is that reason enough that maybe I just should, regardless? How do I carve out the space to have some room to process through all that? From a practical standpoint, my house is pretty small. I don’t really want my wife and kids to sit through nights of Dad just sitting choking out songs and crying on the piano bench. What will it take for me to be ready to start the healing process in this area of my self?

Thread Three

About the time I was listening to the Ragamuffin album, a piece from Crisanne Werner hit my inbox. I met Crisanne at a retreat several years ago that, even though it wasn’t advertised as such, ended up being a bunch of people all in stages of religious deconstruction and related grief. Crisanne has been writing about her experience since then, and her latest post is about coming to grips with starting to reconstruct. She talks about needing to enroll her child in a preschool run by an evangelical church, about it initially triggering all her anti-evangelical responses, and by the end of the year starting, as she said it, to “come to peace with evangelicalism”.

I am very happy for Crisanne that she has been able to start to find that peace; I am completely not there yet. Not even ready to start thinking about heading there yet. The darkness, harm, deception, hatred, manipulation, lies, and idolatry that drove me from the evangelical church are still, 6 years later, fresh enough offenses that I’m not ready or able to start getting over. I think I want to, eventually. But I don’t know how or when I ever will be able to.

Now what?

And so when I weave all those threads together I find myself at what feels like an impasse. How do I find the key to unlock the huge part of my heart that is my life with music when that musical life is so entangled with a religious background that caused so much estrangement and harm? How do I start to feel safe around the good songs, the non-problematic ones, when the very memory of playing and singing those songs is all balled up in the pain of where I came from? When and how does that reconstruction start? I’m not sure where that answer comes from. But eventually I need to get myself back to that piano bench and start to figure it out.

Thu, 28 May 2026 22:37:04 -0500

2026 Reads: After the Crown by K. B. Wagers 📚

Not as strong as the first one but I still loved it.

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:34:51 -0500

I never thought I’d feel sympathy for Rory Kinnear playing a British Prime Minister after his turn as a thick, pompous ass of a PM in The Diplomat.

But then tonight I watched the first episode of Black Mirror (“The National Anthem”). And, well, holy shit.

Wed, 27 May 2026 23:32:41 -0600

My next post is gonna demonstrate that I’m waaaaay behind on some popular media, but stick with me here.

Andrew Peterson's Ragamuffin concert live recording - some thoughts

Wed, 27 May 2026 08:57:56 -0700

Last time I was on an airplane I started playing the live recording of Andrew Peterson’s Rich Mullins Liturgy, Legacy concert at the Ryman, found myself choked up after the first song, and decided I didn’t need to sit sobbing on an airplane. Yesterday I was on an airplane again and decided heck, let’s give it another try. Short version: there were some tears, some rocking out, but hopefully nobody on the plane was too frightened by me. But let’s explore the long version.

First, just background: nine (!) years ago, Andrew Peterson put on a big concert at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville to commemmorate Rich Mullins and his rich legacy of music and faith. I managed to attend it, and it remains the best concert I’ve ever been to. They did a live recording at the time, but apparently the quality of some part of it was sketchy. Finally last year they did a Kickstarter to fund cleaning up the recording and releasing it digitally and on vinyl. (I have the vinyl still sitting at home waiting to be played. Soon.) Listening to it yesterday was the first time I’d heard those performances since experiencing them live back in 2017. I have two streams of thought I want to write about. First, in this post I want to just dig in with some thoughts on the music itself after revisiting it. Next I want to explore a little bit why these songs and performances are so meaningful to me personally.

Some general technical thoughts

OK, so first just general technical thoughts on the recording. It sounds great. The mix is good, the various instruments come through clearly (no small feat given the size of the band on stage), the re-recorded strings sound native, and the crowd mix is employed appropriately. (It was an amazing crowd. They knew all the songs and participated in all the right places. Goosebumps.) The only production question I walked away with was what Jeremy Casella does different in his own recording than was in place at the Ryman. Somehow on this live recording he doesn’t sound as much like him as he does on his solo recordings or usually does live. I dunno, I’m not a sound engineer.

Revisiting the concert itself

The concert lineup was so well thought out. Opening with Hello, Old Friends. Getting Awesome God out of the way early. Doing the artist round of favorites in the first half. Insisting on the note-by-note performance of the Liturgy, Legacy album in the second half. Starting the second half of the show with the same studio chatter that exists at the beginning of the original album. (The crowd’s reaction when they hear it: so joyful, so excited. The shared love and joy between the musicians and the audience at that specific point is almost overwhelming even in my memory here as I type this post.)

The performances in the first half are all so solid - no surprise given the artists - and almost entirely faithful to the originals. Jill Phillips notably adapts Cry the Name from 3/4 into 4/4, and Matt Giraud adds some amazing Marc Cohn-esque vocal riffs to Elijah, but otherwise, really you get the feeling that these artists grew up and were formed so significantly by Rich’s songs to the point that there was no concievable way to perform them other than just do what Rich did. And it was amazing.

Then I wanna talk about the band. You knew going in that they would be good - Andrew Peterson, Gabe Scott, Ben Shive, Andrew Osenga, Paul Eckberg, I forget who on bass… I have listened to the Liturgy, Legacy album countless times over the past 30 years. It’s one of those I legitimately know note-for-note across almost every instrumental part. And as I listened closely through the live recording, I was still astonished how closely the band nailed it. Osenga had all the electric guitar riffs dialed in. Shive’s piano parts were perfection. Maybe even more impressive (though it shouldn’t be surprising) was Paul Eckberg’s drumming. The drums on Liturgy, Legacy are involved, and Paul didn’t miss a beat.

Anyway…

If you’re a Rich Mullins fan, this live recording is well worth your time. I am so thankful first to have been able to attend the concert back in 2017, and secondly to now have the recording available to revisit.

Tue, 26 May 2026 18:16:03 -0700

Cubs lose ignominiously to the Pirates 12-1, dropping their 10th game in a row.

Oof.

Tue, 26 May 2026 02:48:34 -0700

It’s a short work week, but it’s a travel work week.

CID ✈️ DEN ✈️ SEA

Let’s do this.

Mon, 25 May 2026 10:34:33 -0700

Yesterday at church a friend who is an editor for Random House was talking about editing a new biography of Pope Leo. Someone mentioned the Pope’s upcoming encyclical, to which my friend replied that oh yes, he’d read an advance copy.

I mean that’s a niche flex, but it’s a helluva flex.

Mon, 25 May 2026 09:39:15 -0700

Working to set up a new iPad for my MIL. Going from an 8-year-old iPad still running iPadOS 17 to a new A16 iPad. The device-to-device transfer setup failed, as I expected it might. Restoring from iCloud backup now. Fingers crossed…

Mon, 25 May 2026 06:47:38 -0700

So far this morning:

assembled cinnamon rolls from last night’s dough
left them to rise
5.5 mile run
baked and frosted the rolls
Got ribs thrown on the smoker
Washed up the resulting dishes

And it’s, what, not yet 9 AM? It’s gonna be a great holiday.

Sun, 24 May 2026 08:34:14 -0500

One of these years I’ll become a good Episcopalian and get a decent red shirt to wear on Pentecost. Not feeling the red pants this morning, and the Nebraska football jersey probably isn’t a good choice. Ah well. ⚓️

Sat, 23 May 2026 17:53:12 -0500

2026 Reads: Howards End by E. M. Forster 📚

Wed, 20 May 2026 21:23:46 -0500

2026 Reads: Book of Lives A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood 📚

Marvelously written. Shouldn’t be surprised. I’m not a huge Atwood fan (not opposed, just haven’t read her much) but the memoir was lovely. And yeah, she can write.

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