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Faith turned over to the side that doesn’t capture the light: the underbelly of trust in God—or is it distrust?—so often not shown.  At first glance, Barbara Brown Taylor’s latest book, Learning To Walk in the Dark, seems an exercise in gently poking at faith, like the study of some awkward specimen turned over under…

Sometimes God shows up in unlikely places. Take church for example. This past Sunday during the prayers of the people, a beautiful couple stood up to ask the congregation to agree with them in faith that their little boy would be healed from cerebral palsy. I remembered this couple well: on Easter Sunday, they had…

It’s another week of hermitic writing, I’m afraid, so you’ll be hearing less from me as I push through edits from a second revision. But this morning I stumbled upon a report from Religion Today which I found interesting in light of my church small group’s conversation yesterday around prayer and learning to trust God…

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.  This final victory lap of the book; the last touches on a manuscript that I now a bit bashfully would let other eyes see for the very first time: they were supposed to come with the peaceful satisfaction of hard-won achievement. I had come to the monastery to…

  My favorite poem from the recent series by Andrew Sullivan (The Dish), Poems from the Year, contains refrains from the Old Testament, especially Ecclesiastes.  Even today’s reading from Nehemiah 8, where “the joy of the Lord is my strength,” sounds more poignantly relevant when considered next to the poetic wisdom of Gilbert: “A Brief…

We were driving home from school yesterday when the NPR reports came on.  Another horrific mass killing.  This time at a school.  28 dead, 20 of them children. The sound of gun shots on the school’s loudspeakers were in the background of the news report. My six-year-old son said, “Mommy, did someone get really angry?”…

Yesterday’s pool excursion with my son, Cameron, may have been a big divine hint that I need to do more preparation for Sunday’s small group discussion on the nature of evil.  My son, afterall, unlike me or my esteemed cohorts, is not a self-described cynic, skeptic or religious misfit.  He is just a mostly typical…

If you read yesterday’s sermon, you may have caught some refrains on this theme. The picture I mentioned of the leopard snuggling with a baby antelope might almost pass as a Hallmark card, were it not for the fact that within the hour the antelope will become the leopard’s grisly lunch. But, that picture speaks to…

It was a warm summer day in Vermont when friend and fellow saint and sinner Molly Collins introduced me to Frederick Buechner at his longtime home.  That was some seven years ago. I remember at the time being struck by this well-known writer and thinker’s openness and honesty  with an otherwise complete stranger.  He shared…

By faith, Abraham when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.  -Hebrews 11:8 Every once in a while I spend my morning with the old devotional classic, Streams in the Desert, by L.B. Cowman.  With the…
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