discussion on Exile

I have chosen to focus on this psalm [119] because it formed the important center of Celtic praise. In Ireland it was once referred to as The Biait . The word comes from Psalm 119: 1, which begins B...

In Elie Wiesel’s Night , Eliezer is a Jewish teenager, a devoted student of the Talmud from Sighet, in Hungarian Transylvania. In the spring of 1944, the Nazis occupied Hungary. Increasingly repressi...

After the fall of our first parents, boundaries were something to push past, to transgress. It’s worth pausing to note how we use the word transgression for “sin.”  With its Latin roots, “across” and ...

Before I knew God, I knew nature. I knew the feeling of warmth from the sun on my skin. The crunch of leaves on the sidewalk. The sparkle of the fresh powder snow. It was not until I was a teenager th...

Walter Brueggemann writes that the movement of the psalms is from orientation to disorientation and then to new orientation. The psalms give us a language for transformation in desert spaces: we move ...

I once was significantly lost. When I was a college student in northern Wisconsin, my dad and I were hiking on a trail that was somewhat familiar to me. I had been on this trail just a few weeks befor...

We’re little children wandering the aisles of the internet because we’ve lost the presence of our loving parent. We are desperate for the attention of a good Father who sees us. We have no idea how to...

The unjust steward who, hearing he is going to be fired, doctors his master’s accounts to secure another job, is commended precisely because he acted. The point does not concern morality but apathy. H...

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

The famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade includes these haunting lines: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred… Someone had blundered. Theirs not to reason why, ...

In 2010, an oil rig named “Deepwater Horizon” suffered a catastrophic failure. Due to improper installation of the cement seal, a malfunctioning blowout preventer, and cost-cutting decisions by corpor...

At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, "Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!" And He will say to us: "Vile beings, you who are in the image of...

The second lesson this group of new believers has shown us is that the postmodern path to faith is organic. Lostness, of course, looks different depending upon your perspective and personality. It is ...

The problem we face today needs very little time for its statement. Our lives in a modern city grow too complex and overcrowded. Even the necessary obligations which we feel we must meet grow overnigh...

Nearly everybody knows of at least one sin habit in their life that they wish to leave behind them. Yet, no matter what they do, it seems impossible for them to be free of this habit, character flaw, ...

The robbing of our lives occurs when the core story of who we are—created as “very good” (Gen 1:31) and never downgraded, and “beloved” of God (1 Jn 3:2)—is taken through specific memories and twisted...

Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...

In his excellent book, Recapturing the Wonder: Transcendent Faith in a Disenchanted World , Mike Cosper explains the value in persevering through the difficult realities of practicing solitude. ...

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than the alien intrusion of sin, as the villain. Such an error conceives of the good-evil dichotomy ...

Barbara Brown Taylor recounts her first experience with caving, the exploration of caves that are not prepared or made easily accessible for inexperienced explorers. Her guides gave her a bit of helpf...

Apologetics (from apologia in Greek) is a “word back,” a reasoned defense mounted on behalf of the one we love who is innocent but has been falsely and unfairly accused. Faith desires to let God be Go...

The Hebrew word for “fool” is very close to the Hebrew for “noble,” with only one letter different, and it is sometimes only in the outcome of their lives that the people considered noble by the peopl...

A number of years ago, when sabbath laws were still a contentious issue, a church group was picketing a stadium just before a Sunday game. When Tampa Bay Bucs coach John McKay arrived, the minister co...

Testament  means “covenant,” an alliance between two partners, an “agreement,” a “promise.” The Old Testament covenant was brought to fulfillment in the New Testament. Through Israel, the entire world...

I believe that it is the paradox between serving a healing God and the persistence of illness and even death that ultimately lies behind most theological debates about divine healing in the Church. ...

We sometimes imagine surrender to God as emotional starvation. Every pleasure feels suspicious, and every passion feels in competition with our love of God. We think that the more miserable we are in ...

[R]eliable quantitative research around this has brought some helpful insights to light. Jim Davis, Michael Graham, and Ryan Burge have released the largest study ever done on dechurching in America i...

If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children...

To see with God’s eyes, suppose we were to compare one person’s morals to being in Death Valley, 280 feet below sea level; another person’s morals to being in Denver, the mile-high city; and another p...

If sickness has come into the world through sin, which is conceded, it must be got out of the world through God’s great remedy for sin, the cross of Jesus Christ. If sickness is only a natural condi...