Mar 4
Throughout the season of Lent, I’ve been beginning my days with a devotional series called “The Lent Project” produced by Biola University’s Center for Christianity, Culture, and the Arts. Each devotional contains scripture, poetry, a reflection, artwork, and music. I’ve remarked on several occasions that poetry is not my native tongue and that I often struggle to connect with it. But I was moved by this morning’s selection. Read more
Today feels like a miscellany day. Here’s some of what I’ve been reading and pondering over the last few days. I’m thinking we may have a “main character” problem in our cultural discourse these days…
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I doubt it will surprise any readers of this blog that I have a rather dim view of the cultural phenomenon of “influencers” on social media. Actually, “dim” would be putting it politely. The fact that we live in a world where people can have cultural influence simply because they are popular is thoroughly depressing and mildly terrifying. There are a good many spectacularly stupid ideas and cultural trends that are rather popular. You may have noticed. Read more
As I’ve mentioned before, over the last six years or so, I have devoted my sermons between Epiphany and Lent to questions of faith asked by members of our congregation. These can range from questions about specific biblical texts, to theological issues, to how faith intersects with this or that social issue. Sometimes I get only a few questions, sometimes I get so many that I have to extend the series. It’s a series that I find both enjoyable and challenging. The preacher always tends to approach the task with his or her own questions buzzing in the background. It’s always fascinating to take what’s on other people’s minds as my starting point. Read more
I remember the first time I saw the image to my left. It was almost exactly eight years ago on my first of two learning tours to the West Bank and Israel. On both tours, we visited the Aida refugee camp in between Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Jerusalem. On both occasions we paused at the gate and pondered this haunting image of a giant key. The symbolism was explained to us. Many families in this camp still have the keys to the homes from which they fled or were forcibly displaced during one of the wars that attended the founding of the nation of Israel. The key is a symbol of the memory of this trauma and of the hope that they will one day return. Read more
A few people in my social orbit have passed along a recent article by Jen Gerson on the demise of the “New Atheism.” I suspect this is because I devoted my master’s thesis to critiquing the movement way back in 2007-08 and people (rightly) assume that I retain something of an interest in the movement. I did not really expect the New Atheism to age well. And it has not. It seems to have, like everything else post-2010, descended into the black hole of identity politics (could a movement whose key voices are older white males really have expected to survive the last decade?!). Additionally, it turns out that people seem to need more to go on existentially than the cold, dreary world of scientific materialism. Again, not exactly a stunner. Read more
I’ve written before about how Jesus’ parables sound different at different stages of one’s life. The story of the lost son, for example, is a story that seems to contain almost the whole of human failure and frustration, hope and longing, love, and desire. I have at various points in my life identified with the recklessly destructive younger son, the self-righteous older brother, and the heartsick father. I doubt I’m terribly unique in this. The story sounds different at forty-eight than it did at twenty-two. It’s the kind of story that can keep one company for a lifetime, opening new truths, unlocking new understandings, making sense of some of the terrain covered along the way. Read more
I hope you all enjoyed the holiday season and are manifesting a life giving 2024 for you and your loved ones.
So began an email that I received this morning. Which, I confess, kind of put me in a bad mood. What kind of an idiotic greeting…?! I spluttered in my brain. Whatever I was “manifesting” at the moment, it would likely not have been very life-giving for myself or for my loved ones. Hopefully nobody was within the blast radius of whatever corner of the universe my thoughts were commandeering at that moment. Read more
I recently sat with someone who was dying. Yes, I know we’re all dying, but in this particular person’s case, death had moved from the category of “abstraction” to “unavoidable reality.” Which is always a difficult movement, and one with no small amount of anguish attached to it. This suffering is not unto death. So said Jesus about Lazarus’s predicament to Mary and Martha, at least in his majesty King James’ version of the gospel of John. But so much suffering is. Unto death, that is. Or, at the very least, a reminder that it’s coming. Read more
So, Harvard president Claudine Gay has resigned. This has felt inevitable pretty much from the moment she and two of her Ivy League colleagues couldn’t bring themselves to offer an unambiguous response to the question of whether or not calling for the genocide of Jews violated Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment in the wake of October 7. It felt like even more of a foregone conclusion after evidence of multiple instances of plagiarism in her published work began to surface. Read more
Today marks the last day of the year of our Lord 2023. Usually, this time of year has me scrambling some nostalgic year-end-ish kind of post together. I’ll often check my statistics from the last year, highlight the five most read posts, and write a short blurb about each. I’ll say thanks for reading and hope that all of this might give this little blog a bit of a bump in views as one year ends and another begins. Read more
My wife and I were recently wandering around the shops in Whitefish, MT where we had decamped for the weekend to celebrate our anniversary. Many of the shops sold various knickknacks (coffee mugs, tea towels, greeting cards) with funny, often irreverent little sayings on them, which I sniggered and guffawed at, dutifully capturing the greatest hits on my iPhone and sending them to my friends back home while my wife perused slightly more highbrow fare. If you think that sounds like a rather juvenile and unimpressive way to spend part of an afternoon, well, you’re not wrong. In my defence… ah, who am I kidding, I have none. Read more
What can I give him, poor as I am? What indeed: for God today has recreated the world and refashioned you and me in his own image. God today has burst open the frontiers of all possible and imaginable experience and come among us. The Maker of all reaches out his hand and touches [us]. And for that reaching out there is no exchange, there is no fit return that we can make. God’s pure, causeless, gratuitous love can have no answer, except some faint fumbling echo of that very gratuity and pointlessness itself; the gift too great to make sense of.
— Rowan Williams, from a sermon called “Christmas Gifts” in Open to Judgment
Image source.
At a Christmas party last week, I became the proud owner of an orange rotary telephone. This artifact came into my possession via a gift exchange where guests were instructed not to buy anything. Typically what happens at these kinds of gift exchanges is that people either set to work doing virtuous things like baking a loaf of banana bread or they rummage around in their house for something that either don’t need, don’t like, or think would make for a hilarious gag. I’m pretty sure some of the gifts at this particular party have been circulating for at least half a decade. It’s all great fun. Read more
My son is just over 6’10 and he hates basketball. How much fatherly despair can fit in one sentence, I wonder? Far more than is good or healthy or sane, to put it mildly. Right around the time he passed his dear old dad in height (I think he was eight or nine) and it became obvious that his height might just confer an athletic advantage or two, said dad began to invest considerable and wildly disproportionate emotional energy into his son’s sporting pursuits. Basketball, obviously. Volleyball. Hockey, for a short time. Football, as middle school gave way to high school. Without exception, my son’s interest in these sports failed to even come close to his father’s. His general approach to sports could be summed up in a word. Actually a lonely syllable would suffice. Meh.
Last year around this time, I wrote a short piece on my first Christmas at the jail, about how Christmas carols sound different surrounded by plastic and concrete than they do in candle-lit church sanctuaries, about how lines like “And you, beneath life’s crushing load, whose forms are bending low” or “For sinners here, the silent Word is pleading” seem somehow more urgent or pressing or something here. The familiar words come crashing into the ugliness of the human condition from out there in “abstract theology land” with startling force. Read more
Last night, I spoke with a friend about prayer. A mutual acquaintance had received bad news. What do we pray for? Peace? Healing? Comfort? Strength to endure? “Thy will be done” (those four words we pray when we run out of ideas, the last best expression of hope and resignation whereby we collapse into the words of Christ himself)? What does prayer even do? Are we trying to get God to get busy with what he would otherwise be disinclined to do without our entreaties? Does God require arm-twisting? Is there a critical mass of prayer required to move the divine needle? When it comes to the nature of prayer, it doesn’t take too long before we’re in head-scratching territory. It sort of defies airtight explanation. “I pray because Jesus prayed and because he told his followers to pray” can sound like a cop-out. Or it can sound like the deepest, truest thing one could say. Depending on the day. Read more
I clicked on the headline somewhat unthinkingly (as I too often do). “The forgotten war in Syria.” It’s a place and a people that has a unique place in my heart given our church’s efforts to sponsor refugees during the Syrian refugee crisis, given the number of words that I wrote and spoke around that time advocating for a compassionate response, given the Syrian men, women, and children that I have come to know in our city over the last eight years or so. I had done a recent presentation on our church’s response to the Syrian crisis at a conference a few weeks ago, so I suppose that contributed to my reasons for clicking the link. But mostly I clicked because the war in Syria had receded into the shadows of my heart and mind and I probably felt like it shouldn’t have. Read more
It’s been fascinating to observe the ongoing parsing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s conversion to Christianity. I’ve reflected on it briefly (here and here). This conversion been the subject of conversation with friends and acquaintances. It’s led down all kinds of interesting little trails. What counts as a “legitimate” conversion? It is even right or proper to speak of such a thing? Is the language of conversion simply a way to speak about subjective preference? Can we actually make the argument that some belief systems are “better” or “truer” or “more useful” in the context of pluralism in all its forms? Is “conversion” the right word to use for being persuaded by a cultural or civilizational argument? Should there not be some kind of emotional, spiritual, or affective component to things? How does what we’re converting from affect what we end up converting to? So many questions… Read more
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Rumblings 