On Saturday, November 4, I’m doing a special Zoom lecture/presentation on the great medieval figure Julian of Norwich (best known for saying “All shall be well”). There was more to the writer than a sunny disposition. Much more …
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Anybody out there heard of Taylor Swift?
Kidding! Who hasn’t?
Swift’s Eras stadium tour crashed Ticketmaster’s site when fans overwhelmed the Internet. One of her concerts in Seattle measured on a seismograph; fans’ cheering, dancing, and singing combined with her massive sound system to generate seismic activity of 2.3.
How do you know you’ve made it as a pop star? When your performance causes an earthquake.
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Tomorrow, Jill and I head to Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey as I begin a 2 1/2-month appointment as a Visiting Scholar!. I’m excited.
Other than a monthly meeting with other Scholars to share our learning, no responsibilities save research and study and writing. I’m anticipating. …
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When’s the last time you said to yourself, “That just isn’t right”?
I’m talking about our reaction to some terrible situation, some unfairness, some inhuman cruelty. You feel anger or sorrow or an aching sense of bewilderment over the indignity done. The sheer wrongness.
And it doesn’t help that the news sometimes seems downright apocalyptic. With temperatures soaring, breaking records, wilting people’s souls. Injustice is in on full display. And all the while our communities are more divided, polarized, at odds than ever.
Paul the apostle turned to a dramatic image to help us with all that. …
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I’m thinking of the time my son Micah was little. He battled chronic ear infections back then. The allergy-related fluid in his ears made it hard for him to hear words clearly. Micah was slower to pick up words. He wanted to talk, but his lack of vocabulary frustrated his attempts.
We noticed this especially when we had nightly family prayers just before the boys went to bed.
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My friend Chris Maxwell is a writer—a fellow minister with a love of words—and a way with words.
He told me about rereading a chapter he was about to send off to his publisher, a chapter in which he had quoted Jesus’s invitation to rest, as in, “Come to me, all you are weary and heavy-laden.” Jesus goes on to say the burden he lays on us—the yoke— will be light.
Chris discovered, though, that he had misspelled one word—frequently.
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My wife and I recently took a trip to the Canadian Rockies to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary--something special to mark that milestone of our decades of life together.
We saw turquoise lakes and stunning waterfalls; wildlife like bears and bighorn sheep; we stopped at quaint shops. And, no surprise, the most impressive parts of our traveling in the Rockies had to do with mountains: Snow-capped peaks filled our sight just about our whole time there—everywhere we turned.
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There we were, in our backyard for this momentous event. The gently clouded, mostly sunny, warmer-than-normal weather cooperated. (Whew!)
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I’ve been living with a word that helps me: Relinquishment. It’s not the same as resignation. We are not talking about a droopy, “I-couldn’t-care-less-what-happens” outlook.
“Resignation,” as writer Catherine Marshall notes, “lies down in the dust of a godless universe and steels itself for the worst.” Relinquishment, on the other hand, says, I will believe that God has up a divine celestial sleeve some resources I may not see.
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At first, I wasn’t quite sure that that three-letter word warranted much of a place in my everyday praying.
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Like everyone else does, Jesus will start life as a baby.
To be a human is to be vulnerable. To be a baby is to be even more so. But in Jesus God becomes human. Truly vulnerable.
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I learned something recently about newborns. After delivery, after the shock of being thrust from the warmth of the womb, babies reach a stage where they spend about an hour in what doctors call “quiet alert.”
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Ever wonder why the world isn’t in better condition? Why we human beings aren’t better than we are? The last Sunday before Advent, also known as Christ the King Sunday, or the Reign of Christ, attempts an answer.
The celebration, always the last Sunday before Advent, is a relative newcomer to the church calendar. Early in the twentieth century setting apart a Sunday in the church year became a way for believers to remember who is king, the true Sovereign, a way to refresh our convictions about his strong hand. But there’s something jarring and odd about how that story is framed.
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Sometimes the ancient writers can speak with surprising relevance. As I work on my book-length account of my rediscovery of the Trinity, and as I delve into my sketchy memories of my earliest years, Augustine, the fourth-century African bishop, has been helping me.
I’ve been amazed at how like mine his struggles were.
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One early evening, years ago, I sat at home, working at my desk in my makeshift office. Outside my window the sun lit up the yard’s maple and elm trees and made the lawn a luminous green.
But none of that pried my eyes off the project on my desk.
What did it was my then-five-year-old daughter, Bekah. She stood on the grass with thin arms stretched toward the sun, her eyes squinting, her chestnut hair shimmering. Then she ran and skipped and twirled around the yard, laughing with abandon. I could barely hear her through the window, but I could see her clearly.
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I recently came across an interview with Bob Dylan from 1977, when the singer-songwriter was 36. Dylan is usually more profound in his song lyrics than his interviews. But something he said this time struck me: “We’re all wind and dust anyway.” … I think Dylan was hinting at more than he knew.
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Playing before a crowd of 80 in the college auditorium left me a little anxious.
We were all a bit nervous.
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Here’s a question: what does God, believed by religious traditions the world over to have had a hand in the miracle of human birth, have to do with our own entrance into life? I ask it now for myself, six decades after my first days of exploring the world. My just celebrating a birthday has made me even more reflective and curious.
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I’ve learned a new word from the Internet: Doomer.
The term applies to someone so taken by gloomy fears that their mindset is saturated with catastrophe. A doomer thinks that everything is going to heck in a handbasket, that extinction is nigh. That political calamity or global apocalypse is right around the corner. (I know: some days it seems that way!)
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Following a long tradition in my corner of the Christian world, my parish has just celebrated Pentecost. One of the readings for the day presented a jarring and stirring scene. The account puts off some of us, excites others, leaves still others with questions.
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