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Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

Fellow saint and sinner Molly Nicholson has shared this wonderful, little piece by the poet Robert Francis, which comes untitled: Life the hound Equivocal Comes at a bound Either to rend me Or to befriend me. I cannot tell The hound’s intent Till he has sprung At my bare hand … With teeth or tongue. Meanwhile…

This week some of my now very large, sprawling extended family took part in its annual “Robb Regatta” off of Shelter Island, an island off the eastern tip of Long Island, New York.  I regrettably couldn’t make it, but got to see some pictures.  And, it’s quite a show really. The patriarch of our family,…

In an op-ed piece for The New York Times, titled “Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?,” Ross Douthat makes the observation that last week, as the Episcopal Church was approving a rite to bless same-sex unions, Episcopalian church attendance figures for 2000-10 circulated in the religion blogosphere.  “They showed something between a decline and a collapse:…

“If any of you come to me…and don’t hate your father and your mother, your wife and your children, your brothers and your sisters- yes, and even your own life!- you can’t be my disciple.” – Luke 14:26 So much for “family values.”  Maybe that’s because Jesus, as N.T. Wright reminds us in his commentary…

This weekend our family’s Friday movie night featured Chicken Run, an animated comedy directed by Peter Lord and Nick Park which tells the story of one group of cooped-up chickens and their relentless thirst for freedom from their soulless, money-grubbing overlords, the Tweedys.  The chickens’ ringleader is Ginger, an independent, no-nonsense hen constantly hatching (pun intended)…

“Is There A Case for Foreign Missions?”  That was the title of a speech delivered by the writer, Pearl Buck, for a packed gathering organized by the Presbyterian Church in November 1932.  Buck, in summarizing four decades of experience as a missionary kid, wife and teacher in China, was grappling with the deeply problematic inheritance…

My hubby and fellow saint and sinner Paul Dover ran across this article from the BBC which brought tears to my eyes.  It’s about a guy named Jeff Ragsdale who, finding himself alone in the aftermath of a devastating break-up, put up fliers around New York City with his number and a simple message: If…

I was practically lizzing yesterday (to borrow Elizabeth Lemon’s term in “30 Rockefeller”) when I heard this story from someone I ran into the other day.  Apparently he had not set foot in a church for years when he visited one on a recent Sunday morning, with the hope that returning to church would help…

Alan Hirsch’s latest book, The Permanent Revolution: Apostolic Imagination and Practice for the 21st Century Church, co-authored with Tim Catchim, is on my must-read list. Apparently, Hirsch’s main point, according to Hirsch’s Books and Culture reviewer, Gregory Metzger, is this: the five-fold model for ministry set out by the apostle Paul in Ephesians 4- “apostles, prophets, evangelists, shepherds…

Fellow saint and sinner Saskia de Vries, whom we recently spoke with about neuroscience and theology (see our four-part interview, The Brain on Faith) is also a preacher.  She preached the below sermon to her congregation yesterday, and kindly agreed to share it with the rest of us.  Her elaboration on the essence of biblical faith,…
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