What I’ve Been Reading Lately: End of the Year Books (2022)
Now and then I post annotated bibliographies of the reading I’ve doing lately. Here are the books I’ve spent most of my time with in the last few months. Fiction Children of the Arbat, by Anatoli...
View ArticleJeremiah and Divine Emotion
The Prophetic Books are Faith-Forming Reading the prophets of Israel is tiresome work. I’m 31 chapters into Jeremiah, and I feel a bit like I did a few years ago at mile seven of a half marathon. The...
View ArticleThe Flood: Our Gospel for an Age of Planetary Emergency
The Genesis flood: one of the archetypal stories of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. A text that’s been used to trace the beginnings of races, to combat scientific theories of evolution, and to...
View ArticleWhy do Christians say God is a Trinity?
It’s Saturday: let’s talk about the Trinity. (Not for the first time in this column. Nor for the second.) Actually let’s zoom in through an adjacent question: why do Christians baptize in the name of...
View ArticleTruth’s Diagonal Dance (a reflection on Catherine Pickstock)
Pickstock’s Explosive World “Truth,” Catherine Pickstock says, “is both a horizontal dance in time and a vertical dance in the skies.” This is one of the many lines of her recent book that generates a...
View ArticleHow Does the Cross Save?
At the center of Christian faith stands a great irony. The unwillingness of one man to save himself from a cross opens the path to salvation for all. How does this transference occur? Catherine of...
View ArticleCan Humans Be Holy?
In my work as a theologian, I study the language and traditions of Christian holiness. That does not mean I think I am holy. There is far too much evidence to the contrary. Instead, it means that one...
View ArticleWhat Have I Been Reading? My End of Summer Report
From time to time I post brief descriptions of the books I’ve been reading. I’m constantly scanning the shelves of people I know to see what has drawn their attention, and I assume everyone is like me....
View ArticleDoes Saint Paul Believe in the Trinity?
The doctrine of the Trinity solidified as a doctrine, which is to say as a particular teaching of the church, over a long period of time. The heavy lifting took place across the first five centuries of...
View ArticleThe Year of the Locust: A Sermon on War
Today I have war on my mind. A week ago, a surprise attack on Jewish communities in the Gaza Strip ignited a war in the middle east on a scale I haven’t know in my lifetime. We are 18 months into a war...
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