bible and theology on Halloween

Halloween is the beginning of the holiday shopping season. That’s for women. The beginning of the holiday shopping season for men is Christmas Eve.

I never considered myself a perfectionist before I had children. Perfectionism was someone else’s problem. It was the affliction of those pasty-faced library moles that haunted the campus stacks on Sa...

To understand why the Andrea Gail never had a chance, one needs only to search the clues along the shoreline of the Eastern Seaboard. At first, it went by the name of the “Halloween Storm,” given its...

Christmas (a shortened form of "Christ’s mass”) has been an embattled holiday for much of its history— and not just because talking heads on TV like to argue about the “war on Christmas” every ye...

Pilgrim. For a child growing up in America, the word Pilgrim had no religious connotations. Mainly heard in the plural, Pilgrims referred to a community of storm-defying. Black-clad English Puritans w...

Gracious God, we confess that we think of Easter as the springtime holiday rather than the mystery holiday, the hope-time holiday, the now-its-up-to-us holiday. We’re more at home with bulbs and bunni...

Almighty and most merciful Father, giver of every good and perfect gift, we give you thanks for blessing us so richly with your good Word and the holy Sacraments, and supplying so abundantly all our d...

Fear grows in darkness; if you think there’s a bogeyman around, turn on the light.

While Christmas traditions vary the world over, gift-giving is a central practice just about anywhere Christ's birth is celebrated. Sometimes gifts are exchanged on De­cember 6, the feast day of S...

Something strange is happening—there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. God has died in the flesh and hell trem...

Christmas is fast approaching. And now that Christ has aroused our seasonal expectations, he’ll soon fulfill them all!

The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination. A capital destroyed him in his tenement… It had nothing of the Julian thunder-cloud: The assassin flash and rumble . . . He was denied. Phantoms, ...

Before we get to Easter, we need to linger: in the vulnerability of the basin and the towel at the remembrance and promise of the table in the struggle and betrayal of the garden in the shadows and sh...

All the succession of time, all the changes in nature, all the varieties of light and darkness, the thousand thousands of accidents in the world, and every contingency to every one, preaches our funer...

April 1. This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three hundred and sixty-four.

Thanksgiving dinners take 18 hours to prepare. They are consumed in 12 minutes. Half-times take 12 minutes. This is not a coincidence.

Good Friday, and again we are reminded to never lose hope — or at least give it the weekend.

The is an invitation to enter delight. The , when experienced as God intended, is the best day of our lives. Without question or thought, it is the best day of the week. It is the day we anticipate on...

We can always find something to be thankful for, and there may be reasons why we ought to be thankful for even those dispensations which appear dark and frowning.

It was Easter Sunday and the pastor gathered the children at the front of the church to ask them about the meaning of Easter. The pastor was disappointed as he listened to the first response: “Easter ...

You are the God of ⁠ Abundance, Provision, and Plenty⁠ Yet⁠ So many do not have enough⁠ So many are burdened by far too much⁠ So many squander what they have⁠ So many do evil to get more⁠ The “many” i...

This Sabbath day has been designated as a day of thanksgiving, a day of gratitude-even a day of prayer. We pause, we ponder, we reflect on the blessings an all-wise Heavenly Father has bestowed upon u...

The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.

We will never know, this side of heaven, what terrible struggles took place in the spiritual world between Palm Sunday and Easter morning.

Dare to reach out your hand into the darkness, to pull another hand into the light.

Lord of All Creation … Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer: With Thanksgiving close upon us, we’re reminded again of the gifts You have given us by Your grace and mercy: children and grand-children, paren...

Pentecost is an invitation to dream. For when a community of faith quits dreaming dreams, it has little to offer either its members or the wider world. These dreams involve adopting a new perspective ...

Christ is risen: The angels of God are rejoicing. Christ is risen: The tomb is empty and still. Christ has indeed arisen from the dead. Glory and power are Christ’s for ever and ever. Amen.

Thanksgiving is thus the liturgy of Christian living. It is the continuous sacrifice that Christians offer. Gratitude to God is the continuous sanctification of the world.

Accept, O Lord, our thanks and praise for all that you have done for us. We thank you for the splendor of the whole creation, for the beauty of this world, for the wonder of life, and for the mystery ...