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Three years ago an ambitious Texan helped me start up this magazine. We both liked coffee and beer so The Brew just seemed the natural name for our foray into online publishing. The resulting mental libation is what you see on this site.

An experimental combination of 234 ingredients (or posts) in 29 different Brews (or issues) yielded 387 comments over three years. Sadly, some of the best thinking spurred on by The Brew’s earlier offerings were lost when a nameless, faceless hack, reportedly from the Middle East, wrecked the HTML supporting www.thebrewmag.com.

The Brew then adapted it’s recipe (and online security) to serve up more mature and aged offerings with a more focused voice. Better Thinking On Tap via The Brew provided a small community for writers and readers and a stage for those unknown literary stars who merely needed an outlet to shine.

And as with any legal drug, you have to know when to say when. You don’t want your hands to start shaking or your previous night’s activities to start blurring. You should always be able to remember that time you Brewed and Brewed well.

And I can look back over the last three years and say that we did just that. Some Brew authors went on to bigger things ( Mikaela Trim; Jay Friesen ) and others totally different things. I’m currently considering teaching English/writing and picking up that novel that’s been waiting for me to finish it.

The Brew will remain online for another few months, so we all can come back to it and remember, ‘I wrote that. I commented on that. I Brewed.” Thanks to everyone who wrote, followed, commented and helped make The Brew great for this round.

Eternally Imbibing,

Eric Beach, Brewmaster

I don’t know why, but after a nasty, gruesome break up, ‘who said and did what to whom’ will be the topic of conversation for quite a long while. This past summer, I found myself re-hashing the messy details of a not-so-tragic breakup that took place between my best friend and her never-shoulda’-happened-in-the-first-place boyfriend. Naturally one would assume that I was discussing these things with her, but that assumption would be erroneous. I was conversing with Mr. NSHIFP himself.

This conversation took place somewhere in the neighborhood of six months after said break up. We’d all laid it to rest, but somehow it came up and I’m never one to deny a little drama on a dry summer evening. He talked about how she’d lied to him and I insisted that she did not. Of course, I had a fully biased opinion. Of course, I would fight to the death for the honor of my dear friend. Of course, everything that he was saying was wrong. Of course, I would never try to see things his way. Why give him the courtesy?

In the middle of the hash-slinging he and I shared, I found him repeating the same phrase over and over again, “She’s just not who I thought she was!” I didn’t know how to respond to such a cliché, so I opted to just forget it and attack something petty: his grammar. This was a bad idea as it just left him feeling stupid and even more wounded—it was a low blow on my part, I freely admit. I was not too proud to apologize, and this little piece of humanity that he was showing forced me to try to understand what he was attempting to say. Read More »

I like those scenes in the Bible where God stops people and asks them to build an altar. You’d think He was making them do that for Himself, but I don’t think God really gets much from looking at a pile of rocks. Instead, I think God wanted his people to build altars for their sake, something that would help them remember, something they could look back on and remember the time when they were rescued, or they were given grace.

— Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years

When independent filmmakers approached Donald Miller about turning his best selling book, Blue Like Jazz into a movie, he was stunned. After reluctantly agreeing to meet them, Miller and the writers began the process of writing the screenplay. The story that evolved for the movie Blue Like Jazz is nothing like the eponymous book– which is normal for most movie adaptations.

Film adaptations are usually based on a true story or a project that came from an idea in a book. Before you know it, a book about climbing Mt. Everest turns into a comedy about guys building go-karts in the Sahara. No one expects the movie to be like the book. However, Miller takes it personally when his experiences in real life don’t make a very good story.

In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Miller writes about this experience: hearing his life wasn’t movie-worthy, and how this pushed him to make life-altering decisions. Read More »

From Tim Keller to John Piper to Mark Driscoll, American Evangelicals are rediscovering the purity, the simplicity, the beauty and the life-changing power of the gospel.  For too long, accepting Jesus was merely the initiation into the Christian club. From there discipleship took over in the form of spiritual disciplines, Sunday services, small groups and service in some program of the local church.

A radical separation thus occurred between evangelism and discipleship, between the undeserved grace of the gospel and the seeming meritorious life of discipline and service to Christ.

This separation led to a self-understanding of Christians being saved by grace alone through faith alone but made holy through their own self-effort. This spirituality of self-effort could then slide into a pharisaic legalism that was more hurtful than helpful and left some Christians hardened and embittered and others in a state of neurotic despair. By his own admission Mr. Farley is one who was badly served by a brand of Christianity he calls “obsessive-Christianity disorder.”

Thus, Mr. Farley writes The Naked Gospel as an attempt to “return to the foot of the cross and the door of the tomb to learn all over again” (pg. 16).  The Naked Gospel is a self-proclaimed attempt to “dive deeply…toward the indispensable, powerful core of the Christian faith” (pg. 16).  Read More »

Expectations are everything. As fan of the Coen Brothers, my expectations of a book chronicling the spiritual themes in their movies were pretty high.

Having seen all but the forthcoming A Serious Man, I have an appreciation for Ethan and Joel’s 14 films which, whether critically acclaimed or not, unabashedly communicate a message. Sometimes the message is loud and clear (Intolerable Cruelty), while at other times it is complexly obtuse (No Country For Old Men).

Author Cathleen Falsani acknowledges this and thankfully avoids overreaching in interpreting these messages in her book The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to The Coen Brothers. The award-winning religion columnist for the Chicago-Sun Times also masterfully explains some of the most labyrinthine plots, namely Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing, a feat to make Barton Fink balk. Read More »

Sometimes when we’re reading scripture it can be difficult to relate to. Sometimes it feels like it was written about and for people who live on a completely different planet who have ways of life that are similar to those on this planet but still not completely cohesive with the things we know.

The Bible is a beautiful book with wonderful adventures but it’s also a book full of themes and motifs that few really understand. The truth of Scripture transcends time and culture while there’s also something in the details that gets lost in translation. Our reactions vary; sometimes we’ll try to find a way to make a confusing bit perfectly reasonable by twisting and shaping until all sacredness has been compromised. If you’re like me, you have a tendency to skip over and on to portions that make more obvious sense. It can seem like the ancient scriptures will never be reconciled to modernity. But it’s not all hopeless.

Margaret Feinberg has a passion for the Word of God. Her personal ambition has come to our benefit in Scouting the Divine: My Search for God in Wine, Wool, and Wild Honey (Zondervan, October 2009). Dissatisfied with reading the Bible through the lens of her own experiences and hopeful book knowledge, Feinberg embarked upon a decade-long quest to step inside some of scripture’s most prevalent themes. Starting at the home of a shepherdess in Oregon, she tackles a sampler platter of lifestyles and scripture themes and walks away from the table satisfied. She writes about it in a friendly and fluid style that makes the reader feel like the lucky tag-along sharing marvels at God’s obvious and still intimate glory in some of the country’s most seemingly arbitrary places. Read More »

Hello to all fellow imbibers of The Brew. Due to the economy and some other issues, The Brew will be changing it’s recipe a bit.

We won’t be releasing  new batches every month but instead will be opening up all our past Brews for writers to add a new spice or a some extra hops for sturdiness. Any new article can be added to any older Brew (Emergent Church, Sex, Depression, etc.) at any time to change the flavor of that batch (a.k.a. No More Deadlines). So feel free to experiment until you get The Brew that tastes best.