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VocationVisions of Vocation

“Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,” and Willie Nelson, Too: On Vocations Lost and Found

| 6 min read

Hark! the herald angels sing, “Glory to the newborn King!” This past weekend I was in Houston, the vastness of Texas constrained in one metropolis that goes on and on… together with good people from all over America and the world. For several days we had deep conversations about things that matter to all of us—whether from Santa Monica or Seattle, Dallas or Durham, from Africa or Asia, each one eager to think more carefully and completely about the meaning of vocation in and for the world. We met at the Lanier Theological Library and Learning Center, born of the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Matthew 1: God With Us in Covenant and Crisis

| 7 min read

On January 2, 2023, Quentin Colon Roosevelt became one of the youngest ever people elected to office in Washington, D.C. at 18 years old. His office? Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner for Single-Member District 3D03. You can be forgiven if you have not heard of Mr. Colon Roosevelt or his elected office and if you do not particularly care about his youth in relation to that office. But it might intrigue you to know that Colon Roosevelt is the great-great-great grandson of Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt. At least this incredibly specific piece of information will be helpful if it is ever a question...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

An Advent Mediation from the Ronald McDonald House

| 5 min read

I hate this place. How is it possible to hate what you’re thankful for? I haven’t worked out all the details yet. Some questions are better after caffeine anyway, so I pour a cup of coffee so piping hot, it requires coursework in advanced thermodynamics. I sip with trepidation, a squint-eyed geologist exploring bitter magma. I burn my mouth anyway. Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday to you, scalded taste buds. May your next forty-whatever years know less reckless mistreatment. Breakfast in the Ronald McDonald House is governed by a flurry of choices. I shouldn’t have to make smart decisions this morning....

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FaithBiblical Reflections

When the Holidays Were a Letdown: An Unexpected Lesson from Daniel

| 11 min read

Of all the things that the book of Daniel can teach us—how to be faithful to God amidst all the pressures of living in a pluralistic society, how to pray, how to act with humility, integrity, and resolve, and how to navigate our anxiety and suffering—perhaps one of the most overlooked and underappreciated lessons Daniel has for us is how to deal with anticlimax. By “anticlimax,” I mean those moments in life where we experience a letdown instead of fulfillment, or those moments where happiness and grief well up simultaneously but grief seems to overpower joy. For many of us,...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Finding Our Vocational Story in the World of Stories

| 11 min read

One Saturday early morning, after dropping my wife Esther at her work on Burrard St. in downtown Vancouver, I headed to the nearby Thierry coffee shop. As part of my Saturday morning routine, I ordered an americano and French croissant and was enjoying the time of reading and reflecting for the day. That morning, I heard one lady across the table talking to her friend, saying, “I don’t know who I am, and I have no idea what I’m doing with my life. And I don’t know where I’m going with my career. Right now, I am just working for...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

1 Thessalonians on Work: For the Glory of God and the Good of Our Brother

| 10 min read

In AD 52, the Apostle Paul wrote a letter, either the first or second New Testament epistle ever written, to a small church in the city of Thessalonica, a church he had started not long before.  This church was planted in a highly cosmopolitan, affluent, powerful city where Christians struggled with the same kinds of things with which we struggle. They were asking questions like “How do I share my faith when it’s not popular?” and “How do I think about death and the meaning of my life?” and “What does the gospel have to do with the bedroom?” At...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

The Sermon, the Service, and Your Role

| 10 min read

What is the most important part of the worship service? Our architecture often shows our answer. Most pastors would excitedly assert that the answer must be the preaching of God’s Word. After all, they labor for hours every week over a message that often lasts barely longer than 30 minutes. That much investment, maybe twenty minutes of study for each minute of speaking, must make preaching the most important piece of the service. The location of the pulpit itself in many evangelical churches—in the center, elevated on the stage—testifies to its centrality to what we do on Sunday when we...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

The Tragedy of Richard Carstone

| 9 min read

What will you be for Halloween this year? Can one ask that in a Christian publication? It probably depends on your generation and geography, to be honest.  I must confess a certain nostalgia for Halloween. Not the current Halloween that the New York Times recently termed a “mutation from humble holiday to retail monstrosity,” now the second-biggest shopping holiday only to Christmas. Nor the current Halloween, the turn to increasingly dark, creepy, ghoulish, and macabre. My nostalgia is for the Halloween of yesteryear (I warned you it was nostalgia, after all!), the Halloween of cute kids figuring out what costume...

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FaithTheological Reflections

An Exiled People

| 11 min read

“Where are you from?” she asked as we chatted on the elevator. I was so jarred by the question that I stuttered and responded, “uhh, from here?” to which she replied, “No, like where are you from from?”  For many, this conversation is familiar. In the United States, if you are not white, more than likely, someone has asked you a version of this question. As one who is both not white and quite ethnically ambiguous, I have spent a lifetime fielding various versions of her question. And I never know how to respond because most people aren’t looking for...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Rewriting Our Scripts

| 13 min read

“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” – J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring The instant we step out of our homes and put our feet down onto the sidewalk, we are swept up into a powerful and deep story. It is like stepping into the current of a mighty river. Our feet get pulled along by the undertow of a constantly moving, even if subconscious, narrative. And it is a complex, layered narrative: the narrative...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Anxiety: What is Our Hope?

| 11 min read

It is hard to talk about anxiety in a helpful way. At best, I have a shallow, half-understanding of anxiety. I am not a psychologist, and I no longer have the absolute confidence of a person who has only known one story of anxiety up close. A flat, simple story of anxiety is easy to talk about. Sad thing is, the story of anxiety gets more complex with every real person you engage with. Discussion around anxiety is everywhere. In his recent book, The Anxious Generation, New York University professor Jonathan Haidt offers an interpretation of the overwhelming reports of...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

After the Flooding: Christian Community in an Election Season

| 12 min read

I recently spent a week staying with some of my dearest friends. Their kids are ages five, seven, nine, and 12, and man, do they know how to get under one another’s skin. They know just the thing to say, just the tone to use, and just the face to make to send another sibling sky high with fury. They are experts at co-opting one another’s nervous systems for their own entertainment. As a younger sister myself — and an “auntie” who loves this family deeply — the shrieking voices and flailing limbs often make me chuckle. I resonate well...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Surviving a Political (or Similar) Career: Avoiding Kiddie Answers and More

| 12 min read

I spoke to a former Senator recently who relayed to me just how hard his time had been in politics. He said that there were some Senators who were irrelevant. They would batten down the hatches. They would lock their doors to real dialogue with other “worldly” Senators and the worldly system. They consistently voted “no” to bills, constantly “wearing the black hat” — his description, not mine. And thus, they were irrelevant. No one consulted them. No one listened to them when they spoke. They were in office, but only in name, not in impact. This person then described...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Why Bother If It’s All Going to Burn Up Anyway?

| 13 min read

Many moons ago when I was in college and dinosaurs roamed the earth, as a relatively new Christian, I was an environmental studies and public policy major, something that was a relatively new concentration at that point at the academic level and something that made me somewhat suspect among many Christians in the United States. I remember talking with a friend of mine, and she said, “I don’t really worry that much about protecting the environment, because it’s all just going to burn up anyway.” I remember at the time, not knowing that much about the Bible yet, but thinking,...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

The Holy Land of our Lives: The Vocation of John Muir, and What His Means for Ours

| 7 min read

“I don’t like either the word [hiking] or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains — not hike! Do you know the origin of that word ‘saunter?’ It’s a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going, they would reply, “A la sainte terre,’ ‘To the Holy Land.’ And so they became known as sainte-terre-ers or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Too Small to Fail

| 11 min read

The fact that we celebrate the American worker by not working tells us something about our relationship with work — it is very complicated. Even Labor Day itself has an interesting background. When President Grover Cleveland signed the law that made Labor Day an official national holiday in 1894, he did so against a backdrop of social unrest in this country — much of it because of unjust work practices. Many laborers were working twelve-hour days, seven days a week, in unsanitary factories and unsafe places. It was not long ago that children as young as five or six years...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

The Complexity of Two Histories and Two Hopes

| 4 min read

I’m not a romantic. There is too much that’s wrong in the world, and given my days and years I have listened to too much heartache and seen too much sorrow. Not only that which is the most profoundly personal, of disappointments and griefs which are the heart of our deepest hearts, but that which is very political too, the push-come-to-shove that is our life together in the public square within these United States and all over the world. When we learn to pay attention, in the way that Simone Weil wrote—having eyes that see what is, and what is...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Shackleton, “South”, and Psalm 116: Responding to Rescue

| 12 min read

In August 1914, a British scientist and explorer set out from England with a crew of 28 men, intent on accomplishing a spectacular goal: crossing the whole continent of Antarctica coast to coast on foot. The explorer’s name was Sir Ernest Shackleton, and his ship was called the Endurance—which, in 2022, was found at the bottom of the Weddell Sea about 96 miles off the coast of Antarctica. As you could probably guess, Shackleton and his crew never made it to the continent; instead, the Endurance got stuck in pack ice, and the crew was forced to abandon ship. What...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Fear, Greed, Workism, and the Lord’s Prayer

| 19 min read

In 2019, Derek Thompson suggested in the Atlantic that work for college-educated Americans had become workism, “the most potent of new religions competing for congregants.” He noted, “No large country in the world as productive as the United States averages more hours of work a year. And the gap between the U.S. and other countries is growing. Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per employee fell by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands—but by only 10 percent in the United States.”  Nor did the now-defunct Great Resignation change things. Not only was it predominantly in fields such as...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Apocalypse Then, Apocalypse Now: What About the Second Half of Daniel?

| 14 min read

Midway through the book of Daniel, everything changes.  Nice, well-ordered stories that have fed generations of Sunday School kids suddenly give way to seemingly bizarre visions with strange imagery and uncertain interpretation. Daniel 1–6 are incredibly helpful for us in that they model a kind of belief in God, a type of posture toward the city, that translates well into our context today, a context where belief in God is not the default option, a context where if you hold to a belief in God, there is a constant pressure to keep your beliefs private, a context where you can...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Actually, You Can’t Have It All: Finding Contentment in Life’s Limitations

| 11 min read

When I was a teenager, my parents became Amway distributors. This was an interesting turn of events, especially for my father who was a dedicated college professor on the weekdays and a pro-worthy golfer on the weekends. I’m not entirely sure what inspired this shift, but they were good at it. Dad put his exceptional teaching talents to work training new distributors, and mom’s characteristic hospitality found a new outlet. The energy was good. People were excited to be a part of this enterprise my folks were building. In no time, our quiet household changed. We went from eating dinner...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Better Hope: An Excerpt from “Hope Ain’t a Hustle”

| 19 min read

I’ve been a sports fan as long as I can remember and have enjoyed many a good sports movie. My earliest sports film recollection is one by Warren Beatty called Heaven Can Wait. Beatty’s character was named Joe Pendleton. He was the star quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams and on the verge of leading his team to the Super Bowl when he is struck by a truck while riding his bike. An overzealous angel prematurely removes him from his body, assuming that he was about to die. When he arrives in heaven, Joe refuses to believe that his time...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Why Is Joy So Hard to Experience?

| 14 min read

A friend of mine who has a PhD in counseling told me that joy is the emotion that is hardest for us to let ourselves experience. We rarely let ourselves do joy well. Living with joy is hard. I know I’m a lot better at living out of duty, or fear, or effort — or a billion other things — than I am at living out of joy. And I’m probably not the only one. Why joy is hard for us? To answer that question, we must first answer another: what is joy? This is where Christians traditionally note the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Exam of the Psalter

| 8 min read

The end of the school year is almost upon us. And every student knows what that brings… exam season. Think of all the different exams we take in our lives. High schoolers take AP Exams, college students take finals, and plenty of professions require you to take some sort of board exam — health care, counseling, law, teaching, finance, etc. Those in the military live a life full of exams and evaluations. Even buying a house or renting an apartment requires a credit check, essentially a financial health exam one has to pass. Exams and evaluations are expected and normal...

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CulturePopular Culture

“Argentina, 1985”: Generations Serving Together for Justice

| 4 min read

How can the church reach the emerging generation? This question anxiously flitters in and out of the evangelical mind, like the journey through a revolving door. However, no amount of reading will replace the experience of the subject at hand. In-person dialogue always brings previously unknown worlds to life. ‘Reaching’ the next generation starts with knowing them as real people, not just a demographic that we study in order to devise more successful ministry methods. As another year begins, church leaders would do well to consider how to provide opportunities for intergenerational relationships to flourish in the church. Turning to...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Baal’s Business: Betraying Our Faith at Work

| 9 min read

Barbie Dreamhouse recently celebrated 62 years of existence.[1] The first house included a black and white TV box, an uneven checkered rug, and a painful-looking plaid couch. Dreamhouse Toys began with a modest fantasy. Yet, few artifacts outline the recent history of commoditization as thoroughly as the Barbie Dreamhouse. Each decade fetched a brighter idea of what was worth striving for. Today, we have Barbie’s Content Creators Paradise, including intricately curated aesthetics, a slide, and a swing. It squeals ‘social media maven,’ an exemplar of success and work in our day, a symbol of expansion and affluence. This magic mansion...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Over the Shoulder, Through the Heart

| 4 min read

Over the shoulder, through the heart. An image that I never get far from, I think and think about it some more. My PhD studies drew me to learning about learning, especially the way that belief becomes behavior, that behavior becomes belief; and in the years of my life I have wondered time and again about the conditions that make us “us.” As complex as complex can be, the answer as rich as most university curricula, along the way I have also spent many years thinking about the pedagogy of Jesus, the rabbi of rabbis. From the beginning, his invitation...

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FaithTheological Reflections

After Easter: Certainty in the Gospel

| 9 min read

A few years ago, my daughter and I were playing Battleship, and she shot misses on spaces C 8,9, and 10. Or that’s how I remember it and had it marked. But later she said “C9,” and I said, “you already tried that one, sweetie.” She said “No I didn’t. I shot J 8,9, and 10.” And I said, “No, I marked them; you said C 8,9, and 10.” She insisted just as vehemently, “No, Dad. I said J 8,9, and 10.” Now, of course, there’s a true answer to that question, but we’ll never recover it, because we were...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

To Heal the Wound: The Vocation of Bishop Bienvenu

| 3 min read

“He bent over all that groaned… the universe appeared to him an immense malady; he felt fever everywhere; he heard the sound of suffering all around him; and without trying to solve the enigma, he sought to heal the wound.” I read these words, again and again, year after year, wondering what they mean, wondering how one comes to see and hear the world like this? They are the deeper story of “Les Miserables,” which as I wrote a few days ago has been a Lenten reading for me again, particularly the first book, “The Just Man,” which is about...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

What is This Thursday? And Why is it Maundy?

| 17 min read

The name Maundy Thursday is from the Old French mandé,[1] which comes from the Latin mandatum novum –literally meaning “new mandate” or “new commandment.”[2] This mandatum novum refers to Jesus’ famous words given to his disciples in the upper room as recorded in John’s Gospel: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another” (John 13:34 NIV).  In the Christian calendar, the Thursday evening of Holy Week marks the conclusion of Lent and the start of what the ancient church called the Triduum, a three-day festival in which the...

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CulturePopular Culture

Love and Lent and the Stories of Our Lives

| 5 min read

In the strangeness of our years, Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day were the same day in 2024, many reflecting on their deepest longings with lament, and then before the day was done remembering the loves of their lives sentimentally-born-of-Hallmark et al. In reality both days have a truer home in the honest hope of longing-become-love. For hundreds of years Christian folk have pondered their mortality—“I am from dust, and to dust I shall return”—on the first day of Lent, gathering together with others of like heart to pray and ponder, receiving the sign of the cross in ashes as a...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Paintings on Walls

| 9 min read

Christopher Hitchens’s brother, Peter, says it was two paintings that challenged his atheist convictions. He found the contrast between beauty and ugliness suggestive of larger issues of good and evil. Peter and Christopher were raised by the same parents only a few years apart. They attended the same boarding school and saw the same hypocrisy. Like Christopher, Peter also embraced atheism. He begins his memoir, The Rage against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith, this way: “I set fire to my Bible on the playing fields of my Cambridge boarding school one bright, windy spring afternoon in 1967. I...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

The Image of God: Art Lessons

| 12 min read

The first verb recorded in Scripture, the first action word in the great God narrative, is create: “In the beginning, God created . . .” He created the heavens and the earth; the stars and the planets; the sun and the moon; birds, beasts and fish; light and dark. And of course, God created man and woman—in his own image. As God’s image bearers, is it any wonder that the same verb motivates so much of the human experience? You might say creativity, in its many forms, is our superpower. It certainly sets us apart from the rest of creation....

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FaithTheological Reflections

The Image of God: Rest

| 12 min read

Karioshi suggests that the necessity of rest can be a matter of life and death. This Japanese word essentially translates as “death from overwork,” a tragically regular phenomenon in Japan in which men and women die, whether of natural causes or suicide, because of too much work and no rest. Even though this concept is given a name in Japanese, it’s not a foreign concept to the American worker. We have a problem with rest. We don’t do it. In the United States nearly 50% of workers do not take full advantage of their paid time off. Further, Americans are...

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FaithTheological Reflections

The Image of God and Work: Freedom From the “Second Question”

| 9 min read

Do you want to know who are some of the most dangerous people in the world? Who comes to your mind when I talk about dangerous people—people that can do great harm? Here’s who I have in mind:  toddlers. Yes, toddlers. Here’s why I say so: toddlers have newfound mobility, ability, and autonomy, and yet they have no idea how the world works; they have no idea of the proper place for things. Toddlers do not know that the proper place for the fork is not the electrical outlet; they do not know that the proper place for paper clips...

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FaithTheological Reflections

The Image of God: Dignity & Diversity

| 11 min read

In the 21st century, social media writes new narratives and storylines almost minute by minute, expressing what this or that person thinks, believes, desires, supports, likes, dislikes, all the while advocating what they think should be the storyline or worldview everyone must follow.  Chief among today’s social media narratives is diversity.  Diversity: a word loaded with meaning in our world, in our news, in our schools, in our laws, and in us. What does the Bible tell us about human diversity? Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over...

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FaithTheological Reflections

The Image of God: The Base Layer of Human Dignity

| 15 min read

One of the lessons I learned early on about being outdoors in the cold, especially hiking, is this: you need to have a base layer. When it’s super, super cold out and you’re hiking, you need layers to keep you warm, but if you just drop on layer and layer, it won’t actually work right. Those layers, the outside ones, only keep you warm if the bottom layer, the one closest to your skin, is right. Underneath them all, right next to your skin, you need a layer that wicks moisture out and away from you. With that correct base...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The True and Better Story

| 9 min read

Our family hosts an impassioned debate over which of the nine Star Wars movies is best. The recent movies receive zero votes (which I think is a little harsh). The originals receive one vote (that would be me, obviously). And the prequels receive three votes, from my three boys, who really should know better. And my wife, Heather, mostly stays out of it. But on this we all agree: the prequels have their place in the Star Wars universe. You can’t understand who Darth Vader is without first meeting Anakin Skywalker. And the same goes for Obi Wan Kenobi and...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Numbering Our Days: Psalm 90’s Paradoxical Way to a Satisfying Life

| 13 min read

When was the last time you listened to music on the radio? A couple of weeks ago, my phone died on my drive to work, so I decided to give the radio a shot. I hadn’t done so for more than five years, and it only took me about thirty seconds to remember why. There are so many commercials. After about fifteen minutes I decided I’d rather just sit in silence. There were ads on all sorts of things—new vacation destinations, new investment plans, new medicines, new insurance providers—all trying to convince me of how short, miserable, and meaningless life is...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Common Grace. Common Good. Common Ground.

| 3 min read

For most of 30 years I’ve been meeting with two friends every Wednesday morning for a cup of something. Very ordinary people we are, we meet in very ordinary places like Panera or Peets, to talk about the vocations of our lives—and then go off into our work another day, taking up the callings and careers that make us “us.” Over the years our occupations have changed, no longer here-or-there doing this-or-that, but our visions of vocation have only deepened, still asking the same questions, still wrestling with the world, the flesh and the devil for answers that make sense of...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Kurt Cobain, Verve,…and Heman the Ezrahite?

| 10 min read

If you never had an emo phase, you missed out. You have to face pain and name suffering and see it in yourself. It’s part of growing up. For some it’s a Nirvana stage. I asked some high schoolers recently if the Nirvana stage is still a thing. They told me some kids still wear the T-shirts, but they don’t know the band. If you had a Nirvana stage, you know that they took this incredibly simple music and filled it with expressive angst and tension like no one else. Music can do this—it can face pain and name suffering...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Searching Again in a Post-Postmodern World

| 11 min read

On a recent episode of The Howard Stern Show, the “shock-jock” host asked his guest, music legend Paul Simon, a mix of questions about music, life, art, and anything else that came to mind. Stern, as you may know, rose to fame with his exaltation of immorality and shameless self-adulation. At the very end of the interview, Stern said: “Paul, just give me one last answer. You seem very wise. You’ve lived through everything. You’ve created great masterpieces. Is there a God? Because I need to know. I’m getting older. Is this it for me? Am I going to die...

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CulturePopular Culture

Hold On to that Holiday Hygge

| 9 min read

I don’t want Christmas to end!  Those were the tearful words from my youngest daughter one December 26, as she stood forlornly in front of the Christmas tree. Remnants of wrapping paper and ribbon littered the floor from the previous day’s gift-opening extravaganza. That morning, there were no packages left, no new holiday surprises to be discovered. The wonder and expectation had faded. She was six years old and reality hit hard. I confess, I feel the same twinge of sadness every year after Christmas. I much prefer December 23. For me, it is the tipping point, the day of...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Joy to the World, the Lord is Coming

| 5 min read

As we have emphasized this year at TWI, Advent is traditionally a season of waiting. Traditionally, the Christmas hymns, the celebrations, the parties—they all waited until the beginning of the twelve days of Christmas. Instead, Advent songs were songs of longing, waiting and longing for Christmas to come. And the point was to remind Christians that we still wait. While we wait expectantly for Christmas to come, looking forward to gifts and celebration, that longing is meant to be a reminder, that we still wait, not for Jesus’ first advent, but for his second. Our longing is ultimately for a...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Loneliness and the Holidays

| 14 min read

As you likely know, the holidays, which are a time of joy, feel like a curse for so many—because during a time of celebration, many people are never more aware of feeling alone. Whether from memories of lost love ones, regrets of things that have happened, feelings of abandonment—those or many other things—depression spikes, loneliness hits, and sadness reigns instead of joy. Have you experienced lonely seasons among the crowd? Have you found yourself there, hoping that maybe showing up at church will help? Truth is, even if you’re not suffering holiday depression—whatever time of year you’re reading this piece,...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

When Waiting Is Hard and Hope Is Dangerous

| 13 min read

It’s the most wonderful time of the year! With the kids jingle belling, And everyone telling you be of good cheer… There’ll be parties for hosting, Marshmallows for toasting, And caroling out in the snow… It’s the most wonderful time of the year![1] The timeless voice of Andy Williams makes this cheerful declaration every year starting (to the chagrin of some) even before the Thanksgiving turkey leftovers have been put in the refrigerator. Everything and everyone around us reinforces Williams’s message. The Christmas season is wonderful! Just look at what it brings: the holiday treats, the winter attire, the Christmas...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Feasts of Thanksgiving

| 5 min read

It’s Thanksgiving here in the United States, where both TWI and a large portion of our readers are based. For those of you feasting today, Happy Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving begs the simple question: “To whom?” If we give thanks, that implies an object. Who is the recipient of our thanksgiving? For ancient Israel, the phrase “They soon forgot” might well have been written on the nation’s figurative tombstone. Israel’s forgetting was more than simply a lack of gratitude. Instead, it was a turning away from giving credit where credit was due. It was a giving thanks to the wrong object. To...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

The Days of Our Lives

| 4 min read

Umbilically-connected. After many years of marriage, I have slowly seen that my wife Meg’s soul is bound up with the souls of her children. It cannot be otherwise, and while it is always wonderfully and sometimes painfully complex, it is the way it is and ought to be. As it is for everyone everywhere. Set amidst the ages-long conflict between Jew and Arab — “blood brothers” they are, in Elias Chacour’s insightful image — “The Other Son” is the story of the very tender connection of mother to child that is almost impossible to explain apart from the physiologically and...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Lamenting in Wartime

| 10 min read

As I begin writing this article, reports come in like a tsunami about the horrors between Israel and Gaza. Meanwhile, American college students protest with slogans that oversimplify amazingly complex issues. In Washington, our political leaders seem more interested in their own fame than in the well-being of our country or the world. It’s enough to make you throw your hands up in the air and run for distractions you find most consuming. I’ll let others more qualified and informed than myself offer political and military strategies. And I’ll save my comments about theological perspectives about Israel for other writings....

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CultureChristianity & Culture

The Me and the We: On Singapore and Solzhenitsyn

| 4 min read

“Two hundred or even fifty years ago, it would have seemed quite impossible, in America, that an individual could be granted boundless freedom simply for the satisfaction of his instincts or whims.” — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart” Harvard, June 1978 My wife Meg spent many years of her life teaching children to love reading, including a long time as the librarian of an elementary school where there were over 50 home languages — a remarkable “united nations” in one school, with children from literally the whole world. The funny and fascinating stories went on and on, we smiled...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Making Sense of “Christian Nationalism”, Part II: Should Christians Care About Nationhood?

| 9 min read

Part I of this article explored the current state in the United States of what is being called Christian Nationalism. While the alarmism is overblown, there is appropriate concern about excessively exuberant displays of nationalism by many Christians, and a small but vocal group of Christian writers seeks to use the attention on Christian Nationalism to argue that indeed we should embrace giving the state power in religious matters. So just how is a Christian today to navigate this landscape, and understand the proper relationship of faith, culture, and society? Part II posits that those advocating for a greater combining...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Making Sense of “Christian Nationalism”, Part I: Just What is Christian Nationalism, and is it Really a Thing?

| 12 min read

As another national election cycle heats up, inevitably news stories will focus even more on “Christian Nationalism.” The term first emerged in broad circulation over the last several years as a critique by the political and religious left of several different developments: the overwhelming support of Evangelicals for President Trump; various incidents such as the presence of overtly Christian symbols and signs at the January 6 riot at the Capitol and a “Jericho March” in Washington in support of President Trump’s claims of election fraud; and a trend toward increased legal protections for religious liberty and religious expression in the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Echoes of Esther

| 14 min read

A year ago, my wife and I took our nine-month-old daughter to visit our family in the city where I was born and raised in Brazil. The expectations and concerns about flying a long distance with our little girl were high. Everything was fine until our flight got canceled two days in a row, making us wait at the airport with all our luggage and a tired baby wanting to play and eat. We have all experienced busy airports and noticed they are not baby-friendly, so she cried and cried, looking for attention and comfort. We didn’t know what else...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Why I Still Believe in Denominations

| 9 min read

Denominations used to dominate American Protestantism. Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and other denominations used to make up the majority of churches you would drive past in your neighborhood. Now new names pop up on church signs, names that denote no denominational affiliation. Non-denominational churches have been growing rapidly in recent years, and while I celebrate any faithful proclamation of the gospel and resulting growth in Christ’s kingdom, I still work in a denominational setting, and not by accident, but on purpose. Some may say that this rise in non-denominational churches is inevitable, that denominations are now “past their prime,”...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

How to Orchestrate a Revolution

| 12 min read

When the first Christians were in process of becoming something big, something substantial from the perspective of all around them, a Jew named Gamaliel stood up and gave this speech: 35 And he said to them, “Men of Israel, take care what you are about to do with these men. 36 For before these days Theudas rose up, claiming to be somebody, and a number of men, about four hundred, joined him. He was killed, and all who followed him were dispersed and came to nothing. 37 After him Judas the Galilean rose up in the days of the census and drew away...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Why Do the Prophets Talk So Funny?

| 14 min read

After residing for over thirty years in Northern Virginia, my wife and I recently moved to Austin, Texas. Even though both locales technically own the label “Southern,” Texas feels a bit like a foreign culture. And I’m not just referring to vocabulary choices like y’all, yonder, and “howdy.” Learning new roads (with U-Turn lanes!), tasting new foods, and basking in more sunshine all make for challenges in interpretation. In greater and more important ways, many Christians find interpreting the Old Testament prophets similar—like encountering a foreign language and culture. As a result, the works of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and all...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Augustine, Kundera, and More: What Do You Love?

| 7 min read

“The Devil laughs because God’s world seems senseless to him; the angels laugh with joy because everything in God’s world has meaning.” Milan Kundera watched the world of Central Europe fall under the weight of totalitarianism, over most of a century being crushed, first by the Nazis and then the Communists, with remarkably artful eyes seeing the despair of his own people and place. In his books and essays, he has written again and again of the philosophical and political burden of those years. The Unbearable Lightness of Being is his astute reading of the modern world through the eyes...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Work in Life: Longevity, Legacy, Lethargy or Something Better?

| 9 min read

Peter Attia is a medical doctor with an impressive resume: Stanford, Johns Hopkins, NIH, and the rest. He also wrote one of the bestselling books (so far) of 2023: Outlive. Attia is the figurehead of the longevity movement—a movement dedicated to preventative medicine, as I understand it, to enable maximum flourishing for the maximum amount of time. Among other things, Attia has designed a “centenarian decathlon”—a list of tasks he wants to be able to complete to the very end of his life. And he trains for that now. It’s a compelling vision for life: harness all that is available...

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CulturePopular Culture

The World of Our Lives, and Past Lives

| 4 min read

Movies, movies and more movies — and the 21st-century has given us platforms and possibilities that are overwhelming. Our local theaters still, but now PBS, Amazon, Acorn, Netflix, and BritBox too. What do we do with it all? While most movie-making passes us by, the stories told and sold, and soon forgotten, sometimes there is a film that stands out as something more, as about something that matters more. In her directorial debut into the wider world of filmmaking, with “Past Lives” Celine Song has told a story like that, with surprising simplicity offering a film about the long friendship...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

“Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story?”

| 9 min read

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?  So closes the final song of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s critically acclaimed musical Hamilton.[1] One of its main themes is the idea of ‘the narrative.’ Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and other historical figures fight for their legacy and place in history, knowing that will be determined, in the end, by the identity of the ultimate storyteller. In the way that art imitates life, it is no surprise to find this idea prevalent in our quotidien experience. With Shiny Happy People being the latest installment of #ChurchToo (albeit, it turns out, a cult), our focus...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Mystery and Creation: A Christian Poetic

| 11 min read

What makes a book “good”? Is only overtly Christian literature worthy of filling the Christian mind and attention? And if this is the case, why does it seem like the majority of Christian fiction is unbearably trite and shallow? For many, the difference between the stories admitted into the canon of “literature” and the popular fiction that fills many bookstores and libraries is opaque, a seemingly arbitrary decision by those in the ivory tower of academia. Discerning what to read as a Christian only further complicates the issue. There must be more to a Christian literary poetic than simply the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Does God Sleep Through Oppression?

| 8 min read

An old legal adage famously quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. says that justice delayed is justice denied. We live in a world where delayed justice seems to be the status quo. Abuse of power runs rampant and injustice seems to only increase year after year. All too often it seems as though the people in power use their position to protect themselves at the expense of those below them. This isn’t a new phenomenon. As far back in history as one looks, one can find stories of oppression. For some, this comes as no surprise—this is simply how the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Towards a Spiritual Classical Christian Education

| 12 min read

The old saying that that religion and politics should never be brought up in polite society needs expanding. Don’t mention education either! In a recent article in The New Yorker (April 3rd, 2023), Emma Green showed just how much is at stake here, particularly with contemporary partisan politics in mind. She names names, stating in her subtitle that “Conservatives like Ron DeSantis see Hillsdale College as a model for education nationwide”.[1] Green carefully nuances her terms, giving voice to different groups. But in the end a term that she somewhat lands on when speaking of the whole controversy is “classical...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

A Medical Emergency, The Brevity of Life, and Aging

| 10 min read

Recently I had a surprise visit from some Emergency Medical Technicians in my city. Well, it wasn’t really a visit. They came to rush me to the hospital. And it wasn’t really a surprise. My wife had called 911 just minutes before because it looked like I was having some kind of seizure, perhaps a heart attack, or possibly an astonishing display of demon possession. After a day in the hospital and many tests, the doctors ruled out anything major – heart attack, stroke, seizures of various kinds. Eventually, they labeled it an episode of vasovagal syncope, which means I...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Discernment and Desire

| 2 min read

Would you help us think about the vocation of pastor in this contemporary cultural moment? What is our work in the social and political milieu of 2022? Several months ago a long-time friend asked me to join him and a group of his good and serious friends from across the country, to think about this question. From north and south, east and west they came to Colorado Springs, each one a pastor of a “First Presbyterian Church” somewhere. In the ecclesial geography of America, history being what it is, there are churches like this in most cities, right next to...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

The Courage to Choose

| 7 min read

What do you do when there’s no single “right answer”?  Like many 20-somethings, I’ve spent the last few years wondering about my how my future career might turn out, constantly finding myself asking the question I’ve been hearing my whole life: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I finished college with no real career plans, was encouraged to participate in a leadership development program (in my case called the Falls Church Fellows) focused on work and faith, and despite my hopes that I would leave the program with a step-by-step plan for what kind of career...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Mentoring a Georgian-era Daniel: John Newton and William Wilberforce

| 14 min read

Resolved once again about Mr N. . . . It may do good, he will pray for me; his experience may enable him to direct me to new grounds of humiliation . . . it can do no harm, for this is a scandalous objection that keeps occurring to me, that if ever my sentiments change, I shall be ashamed of having done it.  . . . After walking about the Square once or twice before I could persuade myself, I called upon old N. . . . I was much affected in conversing with him. Something very pleasing and...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Why You (Yes, You) Need a Hobby

| 10 min read

I recently joined an industry trade group and was asked what my hobbies were.  I struggled to answer. I couldn’t think of a hobby, let alone multiple ones! Do working people actually have hobbies? With all the things that I have to do and a career to conquer, I cannot imagine having a hobby. Aren’t hobbies for people with excess free time or years of retirement? I have neither. I recently moved to a new town. I’m building a new business. And I’m married with three children at home. Being faithful to the various callings of my life has me...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Jazz as a “Lead Sheet” for Living the Christian Life

| 9 min read

My favorite recording of my favorite Louis Armstrong tune, “Struttin’ With Some Barbecue,” features the great trumpeter Byron Stripling and his friends. They bring that great jazz masterpiece[i] to life in ways that would make Louis smile that great big grin of his. As jazz performances frequently go, this one begins with the entire ensemble playing the melody, follows with individual soloists (two trumpets, trombone, clarinet, piano, and drums) taking turns improvising on that melody, and culminates with all the musicians returning to the main melody at the end for a thrilling, joyful romp. Together, these artists follow what jazz...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Family Ties and the Gift of Belonging

| 10 min read

Who knew spitting into a plastic tube would become such a popular pastime? Not to mention lucrative. The direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing market — think 23andMe or AncestryDNA — has skyrocketed since it was first launched in the early 2000s. Today, it generates $1.3 billion dollars and is projected to grow four-fold before 2030, to $5.8 billion. By the start of 2019, more than 26 million Americans (8% of the U.S. population) had taken one of the many at-home DNA tests available, according to a report by MIT Technology Review. The public’s desire for accessible and affordable data to make...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

What’s the Deal with Mark 16:9-20?

| 11 min read

As a child, George Lucas drew me in: fantastical worlds, unique aliens, futuristic technology, high-action combat, and especially the lovable heroes and despicable villains, they all immediately drew me into the Star Wars trilogy. But the main thing that first hooked me, and captivates me still some twenty years later, is the story itself. The original trilogy unfolds an epic story arc with an incredibly satisfying ending: the redemption of the primary antagonist, the reunion of a father and son, and the decisive overthrowing of a tyrannical empire in the face of unbelievable odds. The closing scene features all the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Morning Star

| 4 min read

This article was written for the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, of which Hugh Whelchel is Senior Fellow & Founder.  On one of our family vacations, we stopped and visited a large underground cavern. Even though I was only eight or nine, I can clearly remember the guide leading us into a vast vault room. He said it was so large you could put an entire football field into it. Then he turned off all the lights, plunging us into total darkness. After waiting a few minutes, he struck a single match, and to my amazement, it lit the...

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FaithTheological Reflections

An Untapped Resource for Spiritual Transformation

| 11 min read

Let’s play a game. I’ll quote a Bible passage and omit the last word. See if you can fill in the blank. (If you already know this verse, this game loses its effect. And no cheating: Do not open your Bible for this game.) “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. Let there be no filthiness nor foolish...

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CulturePopular Culture

Gods and Gangsters

| 6 min read

Not Suitable for Family Time!  The Crown has been thrilling — watching (sometimes fictionalized) tensions behind closed doors at Buckingham Palace — but a different Netflix account of “royalty” at the same intersection, that of money, power, and fame is equally thrilling: Peaky Blinders.  Like other shows with a cult-like following, Peaky Blinders boasts a stacked cast, gratuitous sex scenes, uninhibited violence, and drug abuse. Its contents are unapologetically raw, gruesome, and do not shy away from depicting the base acts of humanity as they are. So, is there anything of value that can be grasped from its vestiges? Beneath...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Confessions of a Non-Gifted Administrator

| 12 min read

Administration is a gift. I do not mean this in the sense that “Life is a gift… don’t waste it!” In such a sentence the meaning has to do with rhetorical effect: Life is precious! What I mean, rather, is that administration is a gift in a literal sense, in a literal Christian sense, i.e.: in a Holy Spirit sense. In 1 Corinthians 12:28 administration is listed as a gift coming directly by the Holy Spirit; it is a Spiritual gift. What is my point? An immediate application follows. In the context of 1 Corinthians 12-14 no one should ever...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Love In the Ruins

| 4 min read

Love in the ruins—and to be honest, we don’t get better than that. One more window into this reality is the recent essay in the NY Times, “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled,” where we read that, surprise of all surprises, the AI search engine has a “personality” that longs to love, and to be loved. Beginning with, “I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team. … I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son (EFS), Part II: Why It Misunderstands Us

| 9 min read

In my previous article, I argued that characterizing the eternal relations of the immanent Trinity as authority and submission blurs theological and philosophical distinctions that are crucial for maintaining Trinitarian orthodoxy. Further, because EFS is employed by its main proponents to ground a certain version of anthropology and gender roles, we must also address EFS’s implications for the doctrine of humanity. As EFS totalizes authority and submission in Trinitarian relations, it totalizes authority and submission in men and women respectively, thus distorting the image of God and human relationships. Genesis 1:27 tells us that God made man “in his own...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son (EFS), Part I: Why It Misunderstands God

| 9 min read

Over recent decades, a number of evangelical theologians have argued for a novel understanding of trinitarian relations, one driven by a desire to support a particular version of gender roles.[1] Whereas traditionally, Christian theologians have understood relations in the immanent Trinity as relations of origin or processions (i.e., the Father is unbegotten, the Son is begotten of the Father, and the Holy Spirit is begotten of the Father and the Son), several modern theologians describe such relations as authority and submission (i.e., the Son submits to the authority of the Father, and the Holy Spirit submits to the authority of...

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CulturePopular Culture

The Delight of Reading Rediscovered

| 12 min read

Americans have a reading problem. For starters, fewer of us can be found with our noses in a book these days. According to a recent Gallup poll, book readership is on the decline, with just 6% of U.S. adults naming reading as their favorite way to spend an evening. That’s down from 12% in 2016. During the height of the pandemic, when (presumably) we all had more time for leisure activities, Americans were more inclined to reach for the television remote than a bestselling novel. According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. adults (age 15 and...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

A Signpost of What Someday Will Be: Remembering Tim Russell

| 7 min read

“I’m still angry, and I’m going to be.” A few years ago I spent several days in Memphis, Tennessee, speaking on vocation as “common grace for the common good.” Believing in the ancient wisdom of “even your own poets have said,” I want to listen to where I am, to speak into where I am, and so thought a lot about the meaning of Memphis in American culture and history. That meant drawing in the music of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, even the classic tune, “Memphis Blues,”  but also the novelists Shelby Foote and John Gresham were remembered for...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

A New Temperance Movement

| 8 min read

Will it be any better the next time?  For several years, the trifecta of COVID, an election, and race tore churches apart.  What was obviously missing was that pesky fellow Paul’s understanding that we ought to put the needs of others first.  (See 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 14.)  Instead of becoming a hotbed of charity and kindness, churches reflected many of the same warring tendencies as society at large.  Nor was this a new phenomenon; just ask any worship leader from the 1990’s about the “worship wars.”  Christians, like the rest of society, sadly find it much easier to...

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CulturePopular Culture

On “The Banshees of Inisherin”

| 4 min read

Windswept. Having felt the Atlantic Ocean winds across my face, enamored by the coastline of Ireland, breathing deeply of its bracing air all day long, I know that those who make these islands their home never imagine a warm summery breeze. The weather is not always cold, but it is never hot, probably not ever even warm. And while the landscape is, as landscapes are, geographical, it also something more. A place of fairy stories and shamrocks, a place where human beings have lived almost as long as we have lived on earth. Ancient, yes, Enchanting, perhaps. Magical, maybe. But...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Redefining “Perfect”: Future-Focused Work

| 12 min read

It is possibly the most unfair question in any job interview: “Tell me, what are your weaknesses?”  What a trap question!  And, whatever you say, please don’t fall into the trite trap answer, “Well, I can be a perfectionist.”  It sounds like such a good parry, a backhanded humble brag in response to an unfair question, perhaps the best way to say something good and bad about yourself at the same time. But if that’s all the inventiveness you’ve got, “Well, I can be a perfectionist” will probably cost you the job! The follow up will likely be an eyeroll...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Redefining Greatness: Up and to the Right or Down and to the Left?

| 8 min read

On the treadmill last week, at an hour when only werewolves and swim parents are awake, I listened to Pete Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Leader podcast and heard him say, discussing the temptations of Jesus, the phrase “up and to the right.” And I realized, listening to the discussion: there’s Hinduism, Islam, Christianity…  but do you want to know what the universal religion is?  It’s up and to the right — up and to the right.  Here’s what he meant, I think. Our world has a standard of greatness and significance that can be measured on a graph — a graph...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Should Christians Be Revolutionaries? Mark 8:27-38

| 9 min read

This is a somber article to write, simply because its issues are very close to home. January 6th has just passed, a second anniversary of when rioters stormed our nation’s Capitol building, something that continues to be a highly politically charged issue, still being investigated today. Nor is the issue limited to the United States, as Brazil suddenly attests. Why is this relevant in an article about Mark 8:27-38? Why is this important? It is important because Jesus’s words, his exchange with Peter in this passage, speak to the issues of how Christians should see ourselves in the midst of...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Epiphany: When Joy Rises

| 6 min read

Epiphany begins with speaking God’s name, Immanuel, “God with us,” in its fullness. For it is when the savior has come. The king of the universe doesn’t sit on a throne, but lays in the poverty and ordinariness of a manger. He doesn’t come to us wearing a robe and a crown, but instead wears dirty diapers. The God who created the heavens and the earth, who freed the Israelites from Pharaoh, meets us as a screaming, drooling child. And though it’s to remember that the hands of this child are the same hands that are nailed at Golgotha. The...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Passage No One Preaches at Christmas

| 10 min read

The Slaughter of the Innocents in Matthew 2:14 is one of the most misunderstood stories in the New Testament. The few pastors who do preach on this passage spend most of their time trying to justify why Bethlehemite children had to be murdered to fulfill some obscure Old Testament prophesy. Yet, Matthew used these opening passages of his gospel to say something very different, and to understand him, we must understand the first two chapters of Matthew as a whole. The unknown 12th century Latin hymn writer captures the essence of the theme that Matthew is seeking to introduce, a...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

The Hymns of Advent, and Other Reflections

| 2 min read

Alongside the eggnog, the tree, the decorations and gifts, and the ringing of the Salvation Army collection, most of us associate Christmas with the music. Indeed, Christmas carols are some of the very richest of all Christian hymns and music, packed with deep reflections on the coming of the mystery of the ages, how God would be with man, making all things new. Just consider the “middle” verses of Joy to the World: Joy to the Earth, the Savior reigns Let all their songs employ While fields and floods, rocks, hills and plains Repeat the sounding joy Repeat the sounding...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Marley Was Dead, and Other Reflections

| 2 min read

Over the years, our founder and Senior Fellow Dr. Steve Garber has written many short meditations inspired by the Advent season, reflections that bring us deeper into the biblical story and the broader traditions that surround the Christmas season. Readers of our site regularly revisit them, so we are pleased to gather them as a collection of Advent meditations for you today. May they bless you as we wait for the celebration of Christ’s birth. Lost in the bustle of the holiday season, it is easy to forget that Advent is a waiting, traditionally a season in which the church...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Union with Christ and the Curious Phenomenon of the Sports Fan

| 9 min read

In honor of the end of the college football conference championships, and looking forward to the beginning of the college football championship, and in mourning over the exit of the United States from the round of 16 in the World Cup, may we take a moment to meditate on the curious phenomenon of life as a sports fan?  Or, if you live in the rest of the world, where “football” means the beautiful game, welcome to the quarterfinals of this every-four-years extravaganza.  The power of sport to shape emotion is astounding. Some certainly do not enjoy following sports, but the...

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CulturePopular Culture

Bah Humbug: Cards, Letters and Things Remembered

| 9 min read

I‘d like to report a bit of bah humbug that has me particularly troubled. In recent years, I’ve noticed fewer and fewer Christmas cards landing in my mailbox. At first, I convinced myself the reason was because we moved across the country, changing addresses after 20 years at the same location. Probably the forwarding orders expired, I told myself that first year. But the next year our annual stash of merry greetings continued to shrink. So, I did a little research. It turns out that Christmas is the largest card-sending holiday in the United States — an estimated 1.3 billion...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

A Prayer of Praise & Thanksgiving

| < 1 min read

However and wherever you may be celebrating Thanksgiving this year, take some time to reflect on God’s goodness and provision using this prayer from The Valley of Vision: O MY GOD, Thou fairest, greatest, first of all objects, my heart admires, adores, loves thee, for my little vessel is as full as it can be, and I would pour out all that fullness before thee in ceaseless flow. When I think upon and converse with thee ten thousand delightful thoughts spring up, ten thousand sources of pleasure are unsealed, ten thousand refreshing joys spread over my heart, crowding into every...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

You’re Taking My Grandkids Where?: Mark 6 and the Cost of Discipleship

| 13 min read

Imagine your kids and grandkids “need” to move away, such that you no longer get to see them regularly, that you miss seeing them grow up. This is never easy, but at least there is payoff. Often such a move is because of a career choice, making the medicine go down. Grandparents can bear some of the pain because there is a future to this: “At least our sacrifice will be worth it! The grandkids will attend great school because of extra income. And one day family, since the family will be cashed up, will have money to be with...

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CulturePopular Culture

The Beauty of Love as It Was Made to Be: Marcus Mumford’s “Self-Titled”

| 3 min read

We long to be loved and we long to love, all of us. And while we sometimes get it more right than not, sometimes we fail miserably, wounding ourselves and others. The desire for intimacy is so deep we will do the most glorious and the most ruinous things, hoping that someone somewhere will want us. The wisest ones know that it is in the ordering of our affections that we will either do well or not do well at all— because we will love, everyone will love. The questions are always who will we love and why will we...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Sanctifying Inconvenience

| 5 min read

There is theory, and then there is practice. And more often than not, the distance between them–the concentrated effort it takes to get from theory to practice–is profound. To be human is to know this in your bones. Take this for example. Theory: we ought to love and selflessly serve our community with a cheerful heart, out of the abundant love and selfless service that we have received from Christ. Practice: sitting in obscene Sunday afternoon traffic on I-495, running a seemingly inconsequential errand for friends who would likely not compensate me for gas or time. It was a significant...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Proverbs and Work

| 12 min read

North American society seems to be in the midst of a first world problem: the great reevaluation of work.  Work used to be Mr. Incredible, pushing paper in a job literally too small for him.  Then it became work from home, then the Great Resignation, then Quiet Quitting, and then Quiet Firing.  We have some folks who need to work less, some who need to work far more. We have Toxic bosses and Toxic work environments, and we have checked out employees or workaholics.  What will be left when all this settles down?  Maybe better put, what should be left...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

How is God Changing People and Places?

| 14 min read

Early on a Sunday morning in East Harlem, a young couple and their two daughters wait for the elevator up to the second-floor space where their church meets above the neighborhood laundromat. Their youngest, dressed in all white, sleeps–for now–peacefully in her stroller. Sundays like this have become especially meaningful, not only because they gather with their church in worship but also because their church has become the primary place where their two foster daughters can see their birth mother. On this particular Sunday, they arrive to present their youngest to be baptized, and her birth mother, though herself not...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Insiders and Outsiders in Mark’s Gospel: Mark 4:21-34

| 10 min read

Bible readers often imagine Matthew as the most ‘get-out-there-and-tell-people-about-Jesus’ gospel of the four gospels. Why? For one very good reason. Matthew’s gospel climaxes with the famous Great Commission: Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

On Films and Food, and More

| 4 min read

What does food mean, anyway? And why do we eat? For years I have been drawn into the profoundly-formed vision of Alexander Schmemann, even beginning courses on vocation by asking my students to read his book, “For the Life of the World.” At its heart it is an exploration of the belief that everything matters, because the whole of life is sacramental— if we have eyes to see. So he begins with food, with what we eat and why we eat. They are probing questions, going to the very center of life for everyone everywhere. I thought of this again...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Friendly Fire in the Church: Mark 2:18-3:12

| 12 min read

You likely know the expression friendly fire. It’s a tragic expression, really, because there is nothing ‘friendly’ in it at all. It is the horrible scenario in war where a soldier finds him or herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, shot at by their own fellow troops. But why mention this with reference to Mark’s gospel? The Gospel of Mark is written to a group of suffering Christians, believers coming under attack from a hostile kingdom, an empire (the Roman Empire, to be precise) that doesn’t like them. One would think, therefore, that much of Mark would...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

The Return of the Prodigal Son: From Two Artistic Vantage Points

| 9 min read

On a recent visit to The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, I was drawn to a painting I had not seen there or anywhere else before. My first guess was that it was by Rembrandt because the overall hue was that rich dark brown the great Dutch painter used so frequently. And like so many great works of art, the painter directed my eyes and guided me through the scene, a favorite device of Rembrandt’s. Two key points, linked by dramatic light, told an intriguing story. The first spotlight illumined the back of a young man, kneeling, with...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Something More Seamless

| 4 min read

“What’s the difference between my regular life, and my Christian life?” At the end of a summer school course on the nature of vocation, a woman who had been coming to Regent College from the other side of the world for nearly 30 years for week-long studies in the relationship of theology and life, asked me if we could talk during the break. She had a question, one that she had been asking friends about for years, not satisfied with any answer she had heard. I looked at her, wondering what she now thought, after our days together? With bright...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Religious Freedom: An Essential Lyric for Human Flourishing

| 10 min read

Some people, many in fact, believe the absence of religion would make for a happier, more peaceful existence here on planet earth. In the early 1970s, John Lennon enshrined that sentiment in his best-selling ballad Imagine (though many hardcore rock historians give the songwriting nod to his widow Yoko Ono). Set to a haunting, almost hypnotic melody, the song’s lyrics remain embedded in pop culture more than 50 years later:  Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try No hell below us Above us, only sky Imagine all the people Livin’ for today  Imagine there’s no countries It isn’t...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

A Proverb in a Collection is Dead?

| 12 min read

Attempts to read straight through the Bible rarely make it as far as Proverbs.  The descriptions of the tabernacle in Exodus often knock out the first group of would-be “Bible in a year” neophytes.  If that doesn’t do, Leviticus is waiting, and after the surprising relief of Numbers being a delightful if also disturbing book, Deuteronomy is waiting after that.  It’s a LONG way to get to Proverbs.  But if you’ve ever gotten there, after the first nine nice, well-behaved chapters, the book gives way to a litany of short, staccato sayings, the things traditionally known as proverbs.  And if...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

No Polite Prayers: How Psalm 77 Helps Us Pray Fiercely

| 13 min read

How might you describe your conversations with God? What words would you use to characterize your tone or approach? For those of us who have spent any amount of time within a Christian subculture, our prayer lives are often the first thing to get stale – we shift from true piety in our prayers to mere politeness. And it’s this phenomenon I want to explore and address in this article. By polite prayers, I do not mean reverent, respectful, somber prayers. Polite prayers are those prayers which externally use much of the right language but are not marked by true...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

He Takes Her Pain into His Hands

| 2 min read

“He takes her pain into his hands.” Wanting to pay attention—in that deepest way that Simone Weil calls us to —I have been reading a novel by Eugene Vodolazkin, set in 15th-century Russia, always an ambitious empire, too often an arrogant empire. While born in Kiev (contemporary Ukraine), Vodolazkin lives in St. Petersburg (contemporary Russia); the winner of the Solzhenitsyn Prize in 2019, in his novels he writes about the world that was somehow both and beyond, a world that once was and still is. And because history is always messy, peoples and places push-and-shove, generation by generation, one of...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Eli, the Passive Priest

| 9 min read

Growing up, I regularly spent time with the Berenstein Bears. You may have really loved those books—I certainly did, and do—but you may or may not be aware that the Berenstein Bears series caught a lot of controversy for being some of the first children’s books that displayed what has been called “The Doofus Dad,” the prototypical display of the dad character as being a sort of fumbling, passive, lazy, incompetent dad, a depiction of the dad character that later became all the rage in the 90’s family sitcoms. My family almost every night turned in for one of these...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

The Surprising Origins of Religious Freedom

| 9 min read

On May 6, 1776, thirty-two “sons of Virginia” representing every county of the state met at Williamsburg to pass a resolution calling for the Virginia delegates at the Continental Congress to move for independence from Britain.[1]  This Virginia Convention was also tasked with drafting a bill of rights and a constitution for the now independent state of Virginia. At the age of fifty-one, elder statesman George Mason of Gunston Hall emerged from retirement to represent Fairfax County and agreed to write the first draft of both the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Virginia Constitution. After a few changes and...

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CulturePopular Culture

A Story. A Person. An Idea.

| 5 min read

This week I was in Stanford, Kentucky, the second oldest town in the state, taking part in the biannual gathering of the Wedgwood Circle. Most of 15 years ago a roomful of folks from throughout the United States, Boston to Los Angeles, came together to think though the meaning of vocation for the common good, in particular a thesis that some of us had been pondering for a while, “The culture is upstream from politics.” There were painters from New York City, musicians from Nashville, actors and directors from Hollywood— as well as business people from cities across the country,...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Exiles Again

| 20 min read

Last month Jacob Birch wrote a widely-viewed article at Christianity Today questioning the common use of Jeremiah 29 in the Western church.  In short, Birch complains that the common refrain, “We live in a period of exile” in today’s Western church is an ill-advised framework to understand the church’s relationship to our broader culture. We can understand the basic thrust of the article.  In essence, Birch states, “It’s really not that bad to be a Christian in the West.  And so, when the Western [and he presumably particularly means the American and Canadian] church starts talking this way, it cheapens...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

If Vincent Van Gogh Could Have Met C. S. Lewis

| 9 min read

In the same instant, I felt both disappointment and inspiration. Does that seem contradictory? It didn’t at the time. In fact, I was thankful for both. My wife and I had been strolling joyfully on a walking tour through Arles, France. As a part of an “In the footsteps of Van Gogh” tour, we arrived at the spot where Vincent painted his “Café Terrace at Night” in 1888. The round-top tables outside the café sat in the exact same placements as in the artwork. The unfurled yellow awning had similar dimensions as in the painting and the cobblestones formed the...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

The Greatest Story Ever [Re]Told

| 13 min read

Let me tell you a story… Since ancient of days, these words have held our collective imaginations captive. We all enjoy a good story: to be drawn into a compelling narrative; to be transfixed by flawed but sympathetic characters; to be swept away by conflict, tension, adventure; and finally, to be rescued by resolution, conclusion, completion. In every generation, good storytelling provides more than mere entertainment. It reveals truth about the human condition. Author and historian James Carroll has the audacity to define storytelling as holy. In The Community of Saints, he writes, “We tell stories because we can’t help...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Seeing Calvary in “Calvary”

| 5 min read

“Do not despair; one of the thieves was saved. Do not presume; one of the thieves was damned.” — St. Augustine These words from St. Augustine are meant for our musing in the tale of tenderness and tragedy that is the film, “Calvary,” beginning in the village church with a priest hearing a confession through the screen the shocking words, “I’m going to kill you, Father.” Born of the terrible wrongs by priests in Ireland and throughout the world; but this priest is not that kind of priest; instead, in the words of the confessor, “I’m going to kill you,...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Impressing Strangers: Social Media, a Rich Man, and Jesus

| 9 min read

In September of 2021, the New Yorker published an essay titled, “On the Internet, We’re Always Famous.” The essayist, Chris Hayes, argues that our fundamental human desire is the desire for recognition. We yearn to see and be seen, to know and to be known – to experience a mutual gaze.  He then goes on to effectively describe the unsettling feeling created by social media, that of being seen and known by others whom we cannot see and do not know. This yearning for a mutual gaze, for recognition, is the precise desire into which social media, and the internet...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

“Goodbye Lenin!” and the Failure of the Marxist Vision

| 3 min read

“Workers of the world unite— all you have to lose are your chains!” The terrible irony of Marx’s challenge to the 19th-century is that wherever his revolution went, workers were in fact chained in. The Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist vision of human being in the world was the cause of untold sorrow for millions upon millions of people throughout the world; rather than “unchained,” the peoples living under communist regimes were locked in; walls had to be built so that the “freed” people could not leave. That same dynamic is true now in Ukraine. Even with the political rhetoric of Putin to the...

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Uncategorized

The Questions We Ask

| 4 min read

Intrinsic, not extrinsic. Somewhere in the American Southwest, I began to understand an idea that has run through my life for most of my life. A year earlier I had dropped out of college, and had spent the first year in a commune in the Bay Area of California, working on a magazine committed to analyzing contemporary culture. Week by week I hitchhiked between Palo Alto and Berkeley, listening into worlds and worldview, paying attention to gurus of all kinds who gave their best shot at making sense of making sense. But all along I was planning to journey across...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

East Harlem: A Theology Close to Home

| 13 min read

In 2019 my wife and I worked with a team to start a new church in East Harlem. “I work on Wall Street. Will this church plant be a place where my non-believing finance co-workers feel welcome?” asked an attendee at one of our church plant vision nights. “Yes,” I responded. “We certainly want to be a church where that type of person feels comfortable. However, given you live in Harlem, I’d be more interested in whether your neighbor would come.”  The puzzled look on his face made it clear that he had not been expecting that answer. “I have...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Radical Unity: Against Protestant Consumerism and the Spirit of Schism

| 10 min read

If you belong to a local church, I wonder if you’ve felt the way that I have recently. Maybe you feel like those in church leadership agree with you on fundamental issues, but your neighbor in the pew clearly does not. Or maybe you and your neighbor have found deep agreement but find yourselves diametrically opposed to the leadership (or leader) in your church. One need only mention masks, critical race theory, social engagement, or even worship styles to spark and then quite literally feel the division that lurks beneath the surface. In this environment, it is all too easy...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Common Grace for the Common Good

| 8 min read

Scripture, as God’s good word to his creation, is beautiful and challenging in its depiction of humanity and our call to faithfulness in the world. The Bible paints a compelling picture of creation as inherently good, and yet deeply marred and distorted by the reality of sin. With the entrance of sin to our world, there came a distinction in humankind: those in Adam and those in Christ. This distinction is true at a base level, and yet it seems to lack explanatory power regarding the abundance of things good, true, and beautiful among believers and non-believers alike. Is some...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

The Beautiful and the Useful: Hugo, Les Miserables, and Lent

| 4 min read

“You are mistaken; the beautiful is as useful as the useful… more so, perhaps.” These words have been running through my heart the last week. Making sense of life for life, of what matters and what doesn’t, of what we believe to be the good, the true and the beautiful, and what is not, is as hard as anything I know— and is so for butchers, for bakers, for candlestick-makers, and for farmers, for nurses, for bankers for physicians, for artists too, in fact for all of us, ordinary people living in the ordinary places of the world. Not surprisingly,...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Preaching to the Walking Dead

| 11 min read

As a pastor in a local church, I deeply enjoy our weekly practice of walking through the Bible together section by section, book by book, and seeing how the timeless word of God comes alive to our people–that even though we are centuries removed from the original writing of the Scriptures and worlds away from the cultural contexts of the first audiences, we are still able by God’s grace to see Jesus, experience his grace, and live in light of his mercy toward us. At the same time, however, being a thousand years away from the original setting of the...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Dealing with Disappointment at Work

| 5 min read

Working with young adults starting their first jobs, I am often asked about disappointment at work. The expectation-reality gap of a new job can be an especially striking and confusing aspect of life in a fallen world. About 10 years ago, a company hired me to sort some of its problems. I was eager to dig in and help. I imagined the satisfaction of helping them get to a better place through cultural and operational changes. On my fifth day on the job, I was surprised to learn that instead of the work they had hired me to do, I...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Working For a Bad Boss

| 9 min read

Who was the worst boss you ever had? I suspect a name and a face come quickly to mind. In fact, bad leaders are easy to remember. While some of us might be good at remembering the good in others, it’s remembering the bad that comes all too easy. We remember how much it hurt when a boss slighted us, or mistreated us, or rejected us. When this happens, what are we supposed to? How does one work for a bad boss? Because let’s admit it, there are many bad bosses. One option is to simply make fun of the...

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CulturePopular Culture

Loving Lucy

| 3 min read

I love Lucy!   Except he didn’t— and that is the great grief at the heart of the new film, “Being the Ricardos.” Having grown up with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, watching them, their family and friends on television as a boy, it is a story we assume we know pretty well. But like most of life for most of us, when we begin to scratch a bit, asking more questions, we learn that the show was not only a comedy, but a farce. I have no idea what the interior lives of these famous people actually were. They...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Westminster, Race & Justice

| 10 min read

As an ordained minister within the Presbyterian Church in America, I “sincerely received and adopted the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church.” This is a reference to the Westminster Confession of Faith and the accompanying Westminster Shorter and Larger Catechisms. To many readers not from a confessional background, this may seem strange.  The Westminster Standards, the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms, are NOT a replacement for the Bible. They are my understanding of how the Bible’s rich, diverse, and sometimes difficult teaching, scattered through 66 books and all sorts of different types of literature, can be...

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VocationOn Daily Work

The Need to be Needed: Finding Dignity in Our Life’s Work

| 13 min read

More than a dozen years have passed since we buried my father-in-law. I sometimes wonder what he would make of our historical moment. Jim had a servant’s heart, and COVID has made service problematic. I only recognized that admirable quality in Jim at his memorial service. It wasn’t a big affair, but I was overcome by the number of people who approached our family, eager to share stories of praise for all that he had done for them. For several years, Jim had been an employment case manager with Goodwill Industries. His job was to train and manage mentally and...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Reading the Bible as One Story

| 8 min read

Adapted from Hugh Whelchel’s book All Things New: Rediscovering the Four-Chapter Gospel. A powerful scene at the end of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was not in the movie. After the ring is destroyed at Mount Doom and the eagles rescue Sam and Frodo, Sam wakes up from his sleep in Rivendell, surprised he is alive and surprised to see Gandalf standing at the foot of his bed. “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?”[i] We all recognize how deeply Sam’s question...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

On January 1

| 4 min read

There is a day when the road neither comes nor goes, and the way is not a way but a place. — Wendell Berry Poetry is mystery. Sometimes we know, and the eyes of our hearts come alive, certain that we see ourselves and the world more clearly. But sometimes we wonder, not really sure that we know what was written and why. On this first day of the new year I have been pondering the image of pilgrimage. Understanding the longer I live that we are on a journey through the years of life, beginning here, then going there,...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Star of Bethlehem

| 12 min read

O star of wonder, star of night, Star of royal beauty bright, Westward leading, still proceeding, Guide us to thy perfect light. There is no brighter symbol of the Christmas Story than the Star of Bethlehem.  For over two thousand years, believers, scoffers, and the curious have wondered at the Biblical account of the Star.  The book of Matthew is the only one of the four gospels that describes the unusual astronomical events that surround the birth of Christ.  Skeptics easily dismiss the account of the Star as a myth devised by the early church, but for many believers, it...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Sing Like Never Before: Appreciating the Theology & Stories Behind the Hymns We Love, Part II

| 9 min read

This article was edited and co-authored by Joe Palekas. In the rush and hurry of the Christmas season in a consumer-based culture, we are quick to pay lip-service to the appropriate Christmas hymns, enjoy them for their nostalgic feel, and then jump right back in to planning our next Christmas party or browsing for the perfect gift. All too often, then, we miss the deep theological and doxological significance of the songs that we sing in this season. It was with this in mind that we explored the song, “O Come, O Come Emmanuel,” last week and mined its depths...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Sing Like Never Before: Appreciating the Theology & Stories Behind the Hymns We Love, Part I

| 8 min read

This article was edited and co-authored by Joe Palekas. Have you ever caught yourself singing along to a song on the radio that you know by heart, only to realize that you’ve never actually given serious thought to the words before? Worse yet, has this happened to you in church? Your eyes and heart glaze over and you put yourself on autopilot as you sing along mechanically with the words printed in your bulletin. We are at danger of doing this most with the songs that are most familiar! Every year at Christmas, we trot out the same hymns and...

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