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The following guest post ran yesterday on author Amy Julia Becker’s blog, “Thin Places,” as an installation in her ongoing series, “Perfectly Human.”  The reflections materialized after an afternoon spent teaching my now three-and-a-half-year-old daughter how to jump off a one-foot step.  (By way of an update, Sam these days loves practicing this assignment from her physical…

One of the things I love about blogging is meeting new people. Kurt Johansen, who pastors a church in Dallas, Texas and teaches homiletics, recently wrote to say he had edited a book of two sermons by Karl Barth, and offered to put it in the mail for me. I gladly accepted. My very own autographed…

  Lately, God has been talking to me about what it means to hear God speak. First, there was Stanford anthropologist TM Luhrmann’s article, which begged my initial question in Friday’s post: what does it mean to hear God speak? Then there was Sunday’s sermon by Thomas Daniel- all about how learning to hear God’s voice is,…

Stanford anthropologist TM Luhrmann, whose latest book is When God Talks Back, has been studying evangelicals and their approach to prayer.  Luhrmann recently described in an article for The Daily Beast how that field work experience in at least one sense signified a conversion: Luhrmann did not walk a way having become an evangelical- or a Christian,…

Apparently, within hours of its airing, Saturday Night Live’s recent send-up of American film director Quentin Tarantino, in the form of a Jesus who takes revenge upon his Roman executioners when he rises from the dead, had its critics, some of them calling it the single most offensive skit in SNL history. And, to be…

Lent is about abundance, God’s abundance.  When we abstain from certain things, be they caffeine or sweets or a compulsion to fix or control things, we make ourselves open to God’s provision. That’s the counter-intuitive, take-home point of James Alison’s reflections on Isaiah 55:1-9 and Luke 13:1-9, in the most recent issue of The Christian…

I wasn’t sure, so I checked. Apparently, Valentine (or “Valentinus”) was a third-century saint who was imprisoned and eventually martyred for performing weddings for soldiers who were forbidden to marry and for ministering to Christians who were being persecuted under the Roman Empire.  He was also said to have healed the daughter of his jailer,…

With Pope Benedict’s announcement of his resignation still ringing in the ears- apparently even the cupola on St. Peter’s Basilica was struck with lightening just hours after!- today we embark on forty days of Lent. The timing of Benedict’s announcement is striking: isn’t resignation– from those things that would keep us from dwelling humbly in…

I’ve missed you here at this intersection between life and God!  Last week’s scramble to meet a self-imposed deadline for Grace Sticks meant a cyber fast of sorts, but I’m grateful to be back. By way of an update to catch us all up, later this month you’ll get some of my musings on human perfection and…

Last week we heard Lloyd Cole live at my favorite, local live music joint, Eddie’s Attic.  Lloyd even let us take a picture afterwards.  (Yes, you can say it: we’re groupies.) This week as I reluctantly peel away from blogging to meet a writing deadline for Grace Sticks- the full manuscript for which is due the…
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