home on Farming

In Israel’s tribal society, redemption was the act of a patriarch who put his own resources on the line to ransom a family member who had been driven to the margins of society by poverty, who had been...

Preaching Commentary In Israel’s tribal society, redemption was the act of a patriarch who put his own resources on the line to ransom a family member who had been driven to the margins of society b...

May I a small house and large garden have; And a few friends, And many books, both true.

I think when we go looking for fun what we are actually looking for is home. We are looking for peace. We are looking for simplicity, something to fill that spot that has been left by growing up or gr...

The idea of a modest dwelling all our own, isolated from the problems of other people, has been our reigning metaphor of the good life for a long time. It must now be seen for what it really is: an an...

The Garden of Eden, literally the “garden of delight,” is humanity’s original and perpetually originating home, the place of our collective nourishment, inspiration, instruction, and hope.

An elderly master carpenter was ready to retire. He told his employer of his plans to leave the house building business and live a more leisurely life with his wife enjoying his extended family. He w...

For as long as there is a compassionate Father, there will be a home, a table, and a feast. This was Israel’s great consolation: exile was the middle act of the drama, but it was not the final scene.

I wonder. What home are you preparing for? Some people spend their lives building ultimate dream homes so they can enjoy their twilight years. Some find themselves exchanging their bank accounts for r...

When I am away from Liturgy for too long, I find I burn for it now, for the steadiness of the calendar, the words" that ring out in repetition, the heavy scented air. When I return each week, I a...

Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who who creates families for our belonging: We ask for your continual care for the homes in which your people live. Keep them from all bitterness, arrogance, and the...

“When Abram came to Egypt, the Egyptians saw that Sarai was a very beautiful woman” (Gen 12:14). What is considered beautiful is one of those things that often goes without being said. Sarah was about...

We make our home by stories.

The biblical narrative begins and ends at home. From the Garden of Eden to the New Jerusalem we are hardwired for place and for permanence, for rest and refuge, for presence and protection. We long fo...

There is a deep longing in every human heart to return to our ancestral home. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young sing about this in their song “Woodstock”: “We got to get ourselves back to the garden.” T...

If anything, there appears to be an inverse relationship between our growing obsession with the home as a totem object and the disintegration of families that has become the chief social phenomenon of...

Our hunger is the exile’s hunger, but it is also the first step in our homecoming. We hunger, and in doing so learn the shape of our emptiness is the world’s great emptiness in or to prepare room for ...

We shape our dwellings, and afterwards our dwellings shape us.

In the final pages of his great epic The Lord of the Rings, J.R R. Tolkien writes of his heroes, Sam and Frodo, and their desperate quest to reach the cursed Mount Doom to cast the ring of power, a de...

Home is where one starts from.

In Genesis 1–2, God makes a home for his people. From the primeval wilderness and wasteland God begets beauty and form, building the grand house called Earth. God’s creative acts are not simply intend...

Peace like charity, begins at home.

Home shall men come To an older place than Eden And a taller town than Rome. To the end of the way of the wandering star; To the things that cannot be and that are, To the place where God was homeless...

Ancient lens What's the historical context? Original Passover If you frequent any web sites that have thread or message board formats, you occasionally run into the acronym “OP,” meaning “ori...

We fixed up the house and swapped it for another house and then another and then another. During the first ten years we were married, we moved six times. It was like being in the witness protection pr...

The secret of every discord in Christian homes and communities and churches is that we seek our own way and our own glory.

AIM commentary Ancient lens What's the historical context? Original Passover If you frequent any web sites that have thread or message board formats, you occasionally run into the acronym “...

Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you start...

Ancient lens What's the historical context? A Song Celebrating the Return from Babylonian Exile The book of Ezra recounts the return of 50,000 exiles and their entourage from Babylon after Cy...

Place is a quintessentially human concept in that it is part of our creatureliness. E. Casey, who has done the most comprehensive work on the philosophy of place, notes that “to be in the world, to be...