I was driving in Columbus, Ohio, when I came upon a hitchhiker who alternated between holding his thumb out and clasping his hands together as if he were praying. I picked him up. His name was Mike, a...

The wise men were experts in the movement of the stars and signs in the heavens. Their inquiry thrusts the provincial village into a cosmic concern. It is not the scientific data they are searching ou...

I am created to do something or to be something for which no one else is created; I have a place in God’s counsels, in God’s world, which no one else has; . . . God knows me and calls me by my name.

What you do speaks so loud, that I cannot hear what you say.

The biblical fondness for genealogical lists is not dull obscurantism, it is an insistence on the primacy and continuity of people. Each name is a burnished link connecting God’s promises to his fulfi...

Culture is like gravity. We never talk about it, except in physics classes. We don’t include gravity in our weekly planning processes. No one gets up thinking about how gravity will affect their day. ...

In the film  Memento , we meet Leonard, who is searching for the man who killed his wife. He appears to be the typical Hollywood hero of the early 2000s. The hair is right; the jaw line, the atmospher...

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...

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...

You don’t turn from sin to get saved. You get saved to turn from sin.

They hailed him King as he passed by,  They strewed their garments in the road,  But they were set on earthly things,  And he on God. They sang his praise for that he did,  But gave his mes...

May be said responsively, alternating between leader and congregation. Have mercy on me, O God, according to your loving-kindness;  in your great compassion blot out my offenses.  Wash me through a...

Ancient Lens What can we learn from the historical context? All are Unrighteous By the time you get to chapter five of Paul’s letter to the Romans, you’ve heard the argument build: we are unrigh...

Rodney King had led the police on a high speed chase through Los Angeles. Eventually the police got him to stop, and after he exited the car, he was savagely beaten by four officers. The entire countr...

The social location of enslaved persons caused them to read the Bible differently. This unabashedly located reading has marked African American interpretation since. Did this social location mean Blac...

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...

The Forming of a Memory Before we truly remember anything, it starts as an experience. It is a moment when our senses (sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch) interact with the world around us. Those ...

One simple sentence, from my first pastoral supervisor, has significantly shaped how I seek to discern God’s personal will. Each Wednesday during my first year of congregational ministry, we met to re...

Let me share one more lesson I am learning about daily surrender. It concerns the way we relate to others. Daily we encounter people who express views opposite to our own, hold values with which we ca...

Many years ago, I watched a documentary on the remarkable ministry of Mother Teresa among the poverty-stricken people of Calcutta. At one stage there was a moving exchange between her and the commenta...

Each one of us is called to live the truth of our unrepeatable uniqueness. We are not meant to model ourselves after others, however wonderful they may be. A delightful Jewish parable makes this point...

The astonishing good news that the Bible gives… is that God has a personal will for each of us. Because we find this truth so hard to learn by heart, we need to hear it repeatedly. So let me repeat it...

There are people who do not live their present life; it is as if they were preparing themselves, with all their zeal, to live some other life, but not this one. And while they do this, time goes by an...

Resilience is the virtue that enables people to move through hardship and become better. No one escapes pain, fear, and suffering. Yet from pain can come wisdom, from fear can come courage, from suffe...

Contemplative prayer . . . neither can nor should be self-contemplation, but [rather] a reverent regard and listening to . . . the Not-me, namely, the Word of God.

The church does not exist to make the world run more smoothly, but to be a truthful sign of what the world is meant to be.

Faith does not grow in spite of suffering, but through suffering, when hope learns to contradict reality.

The suffering addressed in 1 Peter is not random misfortune but the social cost of a new identity that challenges prevailing cultural norms.

Salvation in the New Testament is consistently portrayed not as escape from creation but as the redemption and transformation of creation.

The resurrection of Jesus is not simply the basis for Christian hope; it redefines the future toward which hope looks.