In 1889, the French novelist Paul Bourget penned The Disciple , where he depicted the life of a renowned philosopher and psychologist, whose existence was marked by a seemingly monotonous routine...
Mark 4:35-41, Job 38:1-11, Psalm 107:, Jonah 1:, Genesis 1:, Matthew 8:23-27, Luke 8:22-25, Psalm 74:14, Psalm 104:26, Genesis 1:21
A Sopping Wet Week in the Lectionary Today’s readings are thoroughly wet. In Job, God is master of the sea, Psalm 107 concerns mariners in the storm, Paul is a little drier, but still gets shipwrecke...
Mark 4:35-41, Psalm 107:, Jonah 1:, Genesis 1:, Matthew 8:23-27, Luke 8:22-25, Psalm 74:14, Psalm 104:26, Genesis 1:21
Note: This was originally part of a guide for the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (RCL Year B) , which includes Job 38:1-11 and Mark 4:35-11. I have adapted the discussion of each of these two...
Summary The lectionary texts since Easter have focused on the accounts of the spread of gospel after Pentecost. There has been opposition in Jerusalem, to the point of imprisoning apostles. But the b...
Sometime in the last decade or so I started hearing the phrase “all that good stuff.” I think it happened first when I was ordering dinner at a restaurant. The waitress summarized the menu briefly, en...
Some time ago, I read about the work of a Wycliffe Bible translator in a remote village in Papua New Guinea. When the opening chapters of Genesis were first translated into the native language, the at...
Whether the Hebrew Genesis account was meant to be science or not, it was certainly meant to convey statements of faith. As will be shown it is part of the biblical polemic against paganism and an int...
If Hollywood decided to make a movie about your life, what would it look like? What genre would it be? Action/Adventure? Drama? Comedy? Who would play you? Tom Cruise? Denzel Washington? For most of u...
As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to ...
In the land whose founding metaphor was the mutuality of John Winthrop’s seventeenth-century vision of a “city set on a hill,” we live more and more in estranged, hostile, exclusive enclaves, linked o...
Genesis 12:1-3, Exodus 3:10-12, Isaiah 55:1-3 , Luke 14:16-24, Matthew 11:28-30 , Psalm 23:5
Invitations are powerful. Like tides, they ebb and flow, shaping the contours of our existence. Some invitations we desperately want but never get—“Will you marry me?” or “Would you consider a promoti...
Exodus 35:30-35, Genesis 41:14-39 , Proverbs 8:22-31 , Matthew 14:28-31, Luke 10:38-42 , Psalm 1:1-3
The truly inventive state of mind approaches the plane of consciousness you’d hope to attain if you were driving down an icy highway and skidded into the path of an oncoming truck ... concentration is...
Genesis 3:1-7, Deuteronomy 30:19-20, Jonah 1:1-3, Matthew 4:18-22 , Luke 9:57-62 , Psalm 25:4-5
The things we say yes to and the things we say no to determine the terrain of our future. My convoluted journey is posted with invitations, and my RSVPs account for the twists and turns. Sometimes, ha...
Preaching Commentary What Are We Waiting For? Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers sang, “Every day you get one more yard, you take it on faith, you take it to the heart, the waiting is the hardest part...
Luke 20:27-38, Mark 12:18-27, Matthew 22:23-33, 1 Corinthians 15:, Genesis 2:18-25
Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? Worldviews Collide In this passage, we have a clash of worldviews similar to some that we find today. While the Sadducees were not mat...
The very nature of light provides contrast. In juxtaposition, differing levels of light illuminate in extraordinary ways, helping us to see what we’ve been missing. In the late 1400s, the art world ma...
I love watching young boys and girls build things with Legos. Their small, creative masterpieces cannot help but reflect their image-bearing nature and remind us we were all made to make things. When ...
As popularized in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s fascinating book by the same name, nudges are small changes in the environment around us that make it easier for us to make the choices we want to ...
Summary of the Text Ancient Context What’s the historical context? The Tower of Babel The story of the Tower of Babel comes after many chapters relating the story of Noah, the flood, and the ...
John 16:33, Genesis 50:20, 1 Peter 1:6-7, Psalm 119:71, Isaiah 43:2
Recently I read about an experiment done by psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He came up with a fascinating hypothetical exercise, which went something like this: Participants were handed a summary of a p...
The drug problems in the U.S. demonstrate this pattern: by heightening powers of perception, chemical stimulants open up a new world to a generation that has never learned to appreciate fully the worl...
Road Trips in Scripture While the definitions of “oceans” and “lakes” had to be qualified a bit in order to relate biblical locations to our present-day vacations, road trips—like mountains—can be fo...
Indeed, there comes a time in the life of every believer and of every church where a voice inside us simply asks, Now what? After we have been introduced to Jesus and have found peace with God through...
If I were making a list of benefits like the one Mike McKinley imagines, only this time using the devil’s actual logic, it might look more like this: Experience the excitement of new romance. Get th...
There is a paradigm shift going on in the realm of forestry. For years there had been a consensus among ecologists that all trees were independent operators, each tree an island unto itself, the fores...