God who hears our cries and is moved by our suffering, Speak to us a word of comfort, challenge, co-mission. Capture our attention and call us out of our routines, That we might catch a vision of your...
We confess, loving and gracious God, that we often find ourselves in a rut as we seek to live out our faith. We do not pray for your Spirit’s ingenuity or creativity. We close off our hearts from anyt...
Isaiah 55:8-9, Matthew 13:44, Lamentations 3:22-23, Psalm 139:7-10, 1 John 1:9, 2 Corinthians 3:18, Luke 2:1-20, John 4:7-26, John 21:1-14, Luke 24:13-35, Matthew 17:1-8, Luke 2:25-38, Luke 1:35-38, Hebrews 13:2, Isaiah 43:19
Almighty God, you have surprised us with your presence in unexpected ways. In the expectations of our routine, we have missed the treasure that you place before us. We come to worship you in community...
Some people find themselves stuck in a rut. Without challenge or new opportunities, they begin to sound like Snoopy from the Peanuts cartoons: “Yesterday I was a dog. Today I’m a dog. Tomorrow I’ll p...
We often get into ruts, on treadmills, caught up in patterns and habits that aren't useful. We don't stop to ask, what can I learn from this week that will keep next week from essentially bein...
According to the groundbreaking book The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, his research tells us that cravings drive our “habit loops.” Some of us crave escape or relaxation through the habit of a g...
The normal course of day-to-day human interactions locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of ...
It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of operations w...
How are vices and virtues distinguished? How is a vice different from sin?…Although most references to the lists of seven use “vice” and “sin” in a roughly synonymous way, distinguishing the two turns...
In his post-apocalyptic novel The Road, McCarthy tells a story about a father and son traveling in search of civilization,. In a bleak, desolate world devoid of any human civilization, McCarthy descri...
Living in a society governed by technique conditions us to believe that in every way life is easier than it ever has been. Technique is the use of rational methods to maximize efficiency, and we...
We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good l...
In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these ru...
For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...
Some of us are interested in religious studies because we are interested in people. People do religious things; they symbolize and ritualize their lives and desire to be in a community. What piqued my...
In her excellent book Liturgy of the Ordinary, pastor and author Tish Harrison Warren describes an encoutner her husband experienced while working on his PhD. While my husband, Jonathan, was getting...
Have you heard the acronym “K. I. S. S”? It stands for “Keep It Simple, Stupid.” Paul doesn’t exactly call the Corinthians stupid (in 1 Cor. 15), though elsewhere Paul sounds tempted to do so, when ...
Prayer is often a temptation to bank on a miracle of God instead of on a moral issue, i.e., it is much easier to ask God to do my work than it is to do it myself. Until we are disciplined properly, we...
We say that Nature rests, yet she is working like mad. She has only shut up shop and pulled the shutters down; but behind them she is unpacking new goods, and the shelves are becoming so full that the...
John 4:23-24, Matthew 25:35-40, Romans 12:1-2, Psalm 96:7-9, Matthew 6:9-13, Hebrews 10:19-20
Ancient worship . . . does truth. All one has to do is to study the ancient liturgies to see that liturgies clearly do truth by their order and in their substance. This is why so many young people tod...
When a person is confused and things refuse to fit together, she sometimes announces a need to get out of noise and turbulence, to get away from all the hassle and “get my head together.” When she suc...
I began to see a pattern at work in many of us. Our emotions were leading us to thoughts, and those thoughts were dictating our decisions, and our decisions were determining behaviors, and then the be...
Philippians 2:3-8, Colossians 3:23-24, Mark 10:42-45, 1 John 4:19, Luke 10:38-42
The fact that our works are done in the service of God is not enough, by itself, to prevent us from losing our interior life if we let them devour all our time and all our strength. Work is good and n...