When I was fifteen, my dad took me to Russia and Europe to fulfill a promise he had made to each of us kids: we could each have one trip of our choice to anywhere in the world. At the time, Dad in his work organizing global prayer initiatives with World Vision International had been…

“[Jesus] said to the apostles, ‘If people do not welcome you, leave their town and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.'” – Luke 9:3-5 The chaplain was making her usual rounds at one of the companies she served. By way of my usual greeting, I had poked my head in…

“I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers…” – Genesis 3:15 “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” – Luke 24:11 I’ve been following with interest the Vatican’s crackdown on women religious and in particular one group of American nuns,…

I wonder if we tire of or become bored by the life of faith because we have stopped using our imaginations.  Maybe we’ve never learned how to use them in the first place. Just imagine that you and I are “living tabernacles.”  Outward and visible signs of God’s grace. Just imagine that everyone else is,…

Yesterday marked the end of a week-long “Mutuality” series with Rachel Held-Evans.  For technical luddites like myself, it was also an introduction to “syncroblogging”: Held-Evans invited bloggers everywhere to reflect on the theme of mutuality between men and women in the home, church and world, and then share their post at the same Twitter address.…

“And this is the boldness we have in [Christ], that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.  And if we know that he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have obtained the requests made of him.” – 1 John 6:14,15 This week the precocious ladies in Clairmont…

I’ve just discovered church stand-up comedian Tim Hawkins.  His below routine- especially the part about the church’s obsession in recent years with hand sanitizer- will make you chuckle.  Tomorrow, some thoughts sparked by 1 John on what it means to pray “boldly”:      

I watched Werner Herzog’s documentary, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” the other night.  The film tells the story of the recently discovered Chauvet cave in southern France that houses the world’s oldest paintings- paintings of a prehistoric people whose life and times can only be faintly reconstructed through the remains they left behind. Their story is…

Fellow saint and sinner Jake Dell (@jakedell73) has written a response to Psalm 23 and yesterday’s post which I have posted in full below.  It captures in a beautiful, C.S. Lewis sort of way, the nature of faith in God’s dawning kingdom (as a place where “goodness and love follow us all the days of our…

The nineteenth century philosopher and theologian Sören Kierkegaard recognized that every individual must wrestle with the implications of God’s Word for herself.  The “collective,” or, in this case, churches and religious institutions, do violence to this necessarily subjective, deeply personal relationship between an individual and her God when they impose a particular, general and “objective”…

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