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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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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Advent Meditations: O Holy Night

| 4 min read

If there were ever a season for the believer to recognize his or her worth and focus on the dignity of his or her fellow human being, it is the Advent season! Advent is a season of waiting, preparation and expectation for the incarnation of the Savior, Jesus Christ.  The word is literally defined as “coming.” The mysterious beauty of the incarnation, God made flesh, captivates us as we meditate on what this means for our lives. Not only does this season symbolize the expectation of Jesus’s first coming but it is also a reflection of the longing on our...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

The Art of Meditation and The Meditation of Art

| 11 min read

If someone asked me what my favorite work of art is, I would not be able to answer. I would start listing favorites (plural) and say why selecting just one would create too many headaches for me. But if someone asked me which work of art I have looked at most in my life, the answer would undeniably be Renoir’s “The Luncheon of the Boating Party”. We have a copy hanging in our living room and I see it ever before me. When we moved to the Washington, D.C. area over thirty years ago, I made it a priority to...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

What We Can Learn from the Second Thanksgiving

| 9 min read

“And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.” — Edward Winslow, December 11, 1621, Mayflower passenger, speaking of the first Thanksgiving Most historians believe the American Pilgrims were deeply religious people who studied the Bible and whose intent was to create a new community based on Biblical teaching.  As they were trying to find a way to express their thanks for their early survival and good harvest, it is quite possible that they...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Rediscovering and Relearning the Bonds of Community

| 12 min read

The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer. —Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together If this world was made by a triune God, a being of community, then relationships of love are what life is really all about. —Timothy Keller Since the early days of 2020, COVID-19 has wreaked social and economic havoc across the globe, responsible for the deaths of more than 5 million people as of this writing. It has pummeled world economies, with at least 90 percent of nations experiencing a significant contraction in per capita GDP, the highest simultaneous contraction since...

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VocationOn Daily Work

November 11: A Sacred Day for a Biblical Calling

| 9 min read

On November 11, 2021, thousands of Washington, D.C. locals and visitors processed in reverent silence to lay flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, commemorating its one hundredth year. Situated in the heart of Arlington National Cemetery, and established on November 11, 1921 when an unknown World War I American soldier was buried in Arlington, it has since become the main artery of honor for America’s veterans. November 11, 1918 marked the ending of fighting in World War I, “the War to end all wars,”–at 11:00 a.m., on the 11th hour, of the 11th day, of the 11th month, the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Bad Accounting, An Eccentric Boss, Complaining Employees, and the Kingdom of God

| 14 min read

Jesus’ parables are stories Jesus told, stories each with a particular purpose – not disconnected moral fables about how to be better people but rather stories to immerse us in another world, a truer world that he calls the kingdom of God. With each story, Jesus gives us a glimpse into, and helps us perceive that kingdom. He tells stories of how we enter the kingdom, how the kingdom grows, and what will happen when that kingdom finally appears, but in Matthew 20 he’s telling us a story of what life in this kingdom looks like: 20.1 “For the kingdom of...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Fiery Snakes, Earthquakes, and Talking Donkeys

| 15 min read

Numbers, the fourth book of the Bible, is undoubtedly the great book with the terrible marketing plan.  The Greek title is arithmoi, the Latin numeri, and hence the English “Numbers,” a title that inspires only a few actuaries and statisticians to even open a sleepy eye. Yet, the New Testament insists that Numbers matters deeply to the Christian faith, serving as a corrective to so many common human tendencies, tendencies that creep into the church and into the Christian life, tendencies that if unchecked will twist and warp lives and communities of faith. Grumbling holds pride of place among the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Bashing Babies on Boulders? Making Sense of Psalm 137

| 11 min read

Where were you on May 2, 2011? I was at an Usher concert with a few friends. It was a great concert, and I enjoyed hearing Usher perform several hits from his newest album, Raymond v. Raymond. The concert, though, is not the reason I remember that day. I remember May 2, 2011 because of what happened after the concert. As my friends and I left the venue, we noticed a lot of people excitedly looking at their phones. We assumed they were just reliving the concert we all just experienced. Until, that is, a pick-up truck with a huge...

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CulturePopular Culture

An Inspector Calls: Agatha Christie Meets the Twilight Zone

| 9 min read

One of the newest streaming services, Britbox, recently served up An Inspector Calls, the seminal work of English playwright, J.B. Priestley.  Being fond of many BBC features, I decided to give it a whirl, expecting a plot with a similar feel to other British mysteries.  However, I never expected “Agatha Christie meets the Twilight Zone,” as Steve Garber, a Senior Fellow at The Washington Institute, so aptly summarized.  Priestley’s play was performed for the first time in a Soviet theatre almost three decades after he survived a German gas attack during WWI and has since found life in every era.[1]...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Why Work?

| 9 min read

According to the Wall Street Journal: “The COVID economic shock has unleashed unprecedented creative destruction, sharply accelerating the transformation that we once quaintly called the “future of work.”[i]Others suggest that this new normal “Work 2.0” was inevitable.[ii] With Millennials comprising most of today’s workforce, including their common demand for relaxed office environments and flexible schedules, businesses must continue to reorganize and restructure to attract and retain workers.  The traditional corporate ladder has collapsed, leaving employees with little career progression without changing employers—career change seems to have become the new normal. A good retirement seems out of reach for many workers....

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CultureCurrent Conversations

There Is No Bible Without Migrants

| 10 min read

Haitians at the southern border. Afghan resettlement. Mexican families. Caravans from Central America. Syrian refugees. Governors as far north as Alaska demanding meetings to address the ‘unenforced borders’ of America. How to think and respond to people coming to the United States of America is never far from the media’s headlines.  Research suggests that many who identify as Christian may be the least willing to accept refugees from anywhere—unless they are already Christians like them, and sometimes not even then! The opposition to welcoming people seeking asylum is particularly strong among self-identified White Evangelicals and Catholics, with a majority believing...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Stories Jesus Told

| 13 min read

Stories. You have to love them. And most of us do; most of us enjoy hearing a good story, not to mention telling one! Whether it be sitting as a child or adult with grandparents, hearings stories of old, or sitting with a teacher or parent (as a young child) having a book read to us, or indeed being the one reading (secretly loving the book as much as the child!), we all love stories. Further, many of us probably know the experience in the middle of an intellectually challenging talk, the relief of an illustration—a story brightening everything, bringing...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Making Peace with Proximate Justice

| 3 min read

The question of my life. While I have spent years thinking about life in the world with my laptop open before me, this past year has been one in which I have given more focused attention to that work. When we returned from Regent College, moving from Vancouver back to our home in Virginia— and entering back into the longer loves of our life, the deeper vocation of our life —I chose to take up the writing of a book.   In the simplest terms, it is about the proximate, an idea I have been wrestling with for years now.   How...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Psalter: An Epic Poem of New Creation

| 19 min read

Every Christian loves the Psalms.  Even those who do not particularly like poetry, or have the patience to grapple with it, still find moments in the Psalms that resonate within their soul.  Who can deny the emboldening tenure of Psalm 23?  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.”  Who is not uplifted by the meditation of Psalm 73?  “Whom have I in heaven but you?  And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you.  My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my...

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FaithTheological Reflections

The Role of Imagination in Evangelism

| 13 min read

Author’s Note: This article is adapted from my recently released book Mere Evangelism: 10 Insights from C. S. Lewis to Help You Share Your Faith. My childhood house had a vestibule. It’s a seldom-used word for a seldom-seen structure. Built onto the outside of a house, it serves as a halfway stop between outside and inside. When my brothers and I returned from a camping trip, my mother insisted we take off our smoky, smelly clothes in the vestibule before entering our house. When C.S. Lewis criticized secular writers, he snuck in an image: these writers did not “see this...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

The Task of Translation

| 5 min read

Tacos and tortillas are easy. And adios is like that. But what about las golondrinas? and Sacramento? Having grown up in California, I began to learn Spanish in the second grade, making my way through elementary letters and numbers, year by year learning something of the complexity of another language. And while I never became fluent, the words and their sounds are written deep into who I am. Some of that is that I was born under the Sangre de Cristo mountains of Colorado in the San Luis Valley; and that I grew up under the Sierra Nevada mountains of...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Reweaving Shalom: An Interview with Author Hugh Whelchel

| 13 min read

Things are not the way they are supposed to be – COVID, racial injustice, political division. The list goes on. Does the very fact that everyone agrees things should be different mean anything? Hugh Whelchel thinks so. Our recognition that things are not as they ought to be points us to a deeper reality – the reality of shalom. Whelchel is the Executive Director of The Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics (IFWE) and his newest book, Reweaving Shalom, is concerned with this exact tension: what is the biblical framework to which Christians can look to anchor our daily lives...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Reading to Be Wrong

| 11 min read

Ragebait, oversimplification, irrationality, and petulance…. Our tribalist and instantly outraged culture has, of course, many causes and few quick solutions. As Charley Warzel noted about one particularly outrageous tweet in a nice piece about the online portrayals of Simone Biles’ withdrawal from the Olympic All Around, “Click on it, and you will learn nothing. You might laugh or get angry; You might join in on a dunk. But I promise you’ll actually learn nothing.” (Note: not all his language would be publishable here at TWI!). Bait is bait, and the smart fish swims on by. Careful, nuanced, arguments and discussions...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Technology and Spiritual Formation

| 13 min read

In their 2019 book Faith for Exiles, David Kinnaman and Mark Matlock released some data on the consumption of screen media in the lives of “digital natives,” individuals between the ages of 15-23. They found that the average digital native consumes 2,767 hours of screen media each year, the equivalent of 115 days of nonstop screen time. For those outside the survey group, it has been easy to sit in judgment over this up-and-coming generation and berate it for spending over a third of a year in front of screens rather than engaging with the world around it. That lack...

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CulturePopular Culture

Pilgrims We Are: The Best Stories

| 3 min read

Pilgrims we are. The stories of my life are always a story of journey, of people on pilgrimage from here to there, from one place to the next. The most ancient story we know is that story, beginning in a garden and ending in a city, and the best stories are one more version of that deepest story. Even the best stories within that Great Story are ones of journeys, the Exodus, the Prodigal Son, the Good Samaritan, the Way of the Cross. Written a thousand years ago, “The Quest of the Holy Grail” is that story too, telling the...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

What the World Needs Now: Zacchaeus

| 7 min read

Picture the scene. Jesus, walking on the streets of Jericho, surrounded by his disciples and talking with them as they go. Perhaps they are talking about the Law, or maybe of the Psalmist; Jesus, humming these lines softly as he listens to their questions: “Oh God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” (Psalm 63:1) Maybe Jesus’ answers cannot be heard over the calls of “Rabbi,” hands of all sizes reaching out, shoulders jostling one another, all...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

“Because I Want To?” – A Christian Approach to Desire and Vocational Calling

| 10 min read

Many will remember the old game show The $64,000 Question, an American television staple in the 1950’s.  As time passes, fewer may remember that the phrase predated the show.  The phrase “$64,000 question” indicated the question at the heart of the issue, often the question hardest to answer.  One can see the obvious appeal when naming a quiz show early in the television era.  Alas, inflation has taken its toll, and I often now hear this as the $64,000,000 question.  Much more impressive to modern ears!  The point remains – what is at the heart of the issue?  What is...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Silent Struggle: Grappling with God through Infertility

| 13 min read

My leg bounced nervously as we sat in the waiting room at the fertility clinic for the first time. I gripped my husband’s hand harder, hoping for strength and comfort from his grasp. What would they find? Should my husband come back to the room with me? What would we have to do to be able to get pregnant? I quaked inside at the thought of the physical vulnerability I knew I would experience in the exam room. I hate this. I hate this. I hate this. This is not the way a baby is supposed to be made. The...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Embracing the Unknown: Rethinking the Job Search

| 9 min read

Having a new job is exciting – new challenges and experiences, opportunities to work with new people, and chance to learn and grow professionally. Finding a new job, on the other hand, can seem like navigating a maze with many unexpected turns and dead ends. The ebbs and flows of the job search quickly turn into the rise and fall of emotion, a ricochet from excitement and eager anticipation to disappointment and defeat. An extended job search, like those taking place during the global pandemic, can lead to frustration and anxiety. The slowness and uncertainty of the process often leaves...

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Current Conversations

Is the COVID Vaccine the Mark of the Beast?

| 8 min read

Albert Schweitzer once wrote:   The Reformation fought and conquered in the name of Paul. Consequently the teaching of the Apostle of the Gentiles took a prominent place in Protestant study. Nevertheless the labor expended upon it did not, to begin with, advance the historical understanding of his system of thought. What men looked for in Paul’s writings was proof-texts for Lutheran or Reformed theology; and that is what they found. Reformation exegesis reads its own ideas into Paul, in order to receive them back again clothed with Apostolic authority. Schweitzer’s stinging rebuke here refers (at least in part) to...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

How to Leave Lockdown: A Conversation with Carolyn Sinclair and Jim Coffield

| 12 min read

As vaccination rates pick up, even in the face of the quick rise of various COVID variants, we are at a period where some countries are having to lock down while others are opening up.  In my own country, the United States, various states have experienced harsher or more mild waves of disease, and some have locked down substantially while others have barely restricted behavior.  Leaving aside the political dimensions of these differences, the time will eventually come where we will – at whatever level we have experienced it – leave our more locked down life and return to what...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Selections from “Poetry in the Pandemic”

| 6 min read

Even as we enter the late stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, and some see the light at the end of the tunnel, it is going to take years to process the impact it has had on us both individually and collectively. We must think not only about how to live in the pandemic right now, but also how to understand it even after it someday ends. With the right-now and someday in mind, we turn to God’s word. Specifically, to the compassionate, ardent, and faithful book of poetry in the middle. What have the Psalms to say about times of...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Motherhood as Vocation

| 8 min read

This article is reposted from its first publication in 2009. We’ve found these reflections to have lasting relevance, and to be well worth revisiting.   In Washington DC, it is only a matter of time before the kind woman standing next to me at a cocktail party will turn from talking with my husband and ask the inevitable, identity-testing, status-gauging question I have come to dread as a new and mostly stay-at-home mother… “And what do you do?” For blessing or curse, I live in a city and a culture that is uniquely focused on work. People come to Washington from all around...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Stop “Letting Go and Letting God”

| 14 min read

It is high time to put open and closed doors in their place.  “Well, that’s an open door, so I guess God wants me to walk through it.”  Or, “That’s a closed door, so it must not be God’s will.”  Such statements sound like trust in God, but in fact they indicate Christians taking the path of least resistance, not necessarily following God’s calling as we choose our vocations and make other important choices. Sometimes God wants us to beat on a closed door until we break it open.  William Wilberforce famously heard God’s call, not to ministry but to...

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CulturePopular Culture

The Seven Basic Plots and the One Basic Plot: Cosper, Booker, and The Stories We Tell

| 9 min read

Being parents of young children, it was a rare occasion (even pre-pandemic!) when my wife and I were able to get out to dinner and a movie. Our last cinema outing had ended with us both falling asleep (an unfortunate reflection of our engagement with The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug). On this occasion, however, we held high hopes that Disney’s remake of Beauty and the Beast would fare better. It turned out our hopes were not in vain, as we both enjoyed a credible remake of a classic story. And yet for me, it wasn’t the special effects or...

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CulturePopular Culture

Robin Wright’s “Land”: Two Essays

| 7 min read

“He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.” These words have been running through my mind the last weeks, thinking through ideas about metanarrative and narrative, about what we believe to be the Great Story of All of Life, and our own smaller stories. I have been reading Friedrich Nietzsche, Viktor Frankel, and Douglas Coupland, each one wrestling with the meaning of life in a world with or without God; and they have pushed at me, forcing me to think more deeply about questions that matter to all of us, whether we want them...

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CulturePopular Culture

In Praise of a Good Morality Tale: the Simple and the Complex in the Fiction of Elizabeth Goudge

| 11 min read

Bibliotherapy.  Never heard of it?  Neither had I, at least by name, until browsing a lifestyle magazine a few months ago. Perhaps you are familiar with this term. For those who aren’t, PsychologyToday describes it as “facilitating psychological growth and healing through reading.” All kinds of books can be therapeutic, and counselors who use bibliotherapy will “prescribe” specific books intended to help a person struggling through a particular issue. I once had a friend tell me that her counselor had prescribed a modern retelling of King Lear in order to make her face dark and hard realities. Others tend to...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Gently Glowing Bushes: When Your Calling Isn’t Obvious

| 5 min read

It’s one of the most common–and paralyzing–questions that Christians ask, “How do I know my vocation?” Many times I’ve talked to folks who are afraid to make a bold move forward, or are stuck between good options and unable to move for fear of missing God’s will. Karen Yates writes: How do we find what we are meant to do?  This is the infamous and expansive search – the quest for our unique calling.  This is the question that keeps us up at night, that makes forty-somethings leave their lives in search for something better, that keeps twenty-somethings from staying...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

When Darkness is My Closest Friend

| 12 min read

I’m beginning to write this just a few days before February, the longest month of the year. I know what the number of days on the calendar says and how February compares to the other eleven months. But for those of us who battle against “seasonal affective disorder” (appropriately but cruelly abbreviated as SAD), the grayness of February seems to fit C. S. Lewis’s image of “always winter and never Christmas.” Actually, my battles against depression aren’t limited to the winter, thus SAD only presents new twists to a battle that simmers most of the year. I have learned a...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

From Kuhn To Christ: Why the Old Testament Matters

| 18 min read

I remember seeing the movie The Game, starring Michael Douglas and Sean Penn on an airplane during a business trip in the late 1990s. Michael Douglas plays a financier named Nicholas, who, having experienced the trauma of witnessing his father’s suicide, throws himself into his work, in the process estranging his brother Conrad, played by Sean Penn, and his wife. On his 48th birthday, Conrad gifts him a ticket for a game, a game he promises will change Douglas’s life. The game is run by a company called Consumer Recreation Services, CRS, but once it begins, it turns into a...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

A Mosaic in the Making: The Indefatigable Hope of Rev. Matthew Anderson, D.D.

| 18 min read

After taking the podium as the Presbyterian Church in America’s (PCA) first African-American Moderator on June 13, 2018, Rev. Dr. Irwyn Ince, Jr. gave a brief speech wherein he shared both his excitement to lead as well as his grief that there were so few models to inspire himself and other Black Presbyterians. “For most of my years in this church,” Ince said, “I have struggled to greet any court of our church with the phrase, ‘Fathers and brothers.’ Brothers? Yes. But fathers? No.” Things began to change, however, when Ince began learning about some of the courageous Black Presbyterians...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Christians As a Cultural Minority (Again)

| 16 min read

The relationship between the culture and politics is complex and subtle, so it’s worth saying something about each, starting with culture. Culture involves far more than what we traditionally think of as politics – for example, art, music, entertainment, social institutions, and customs — whereas politics is one aspect of the work of government and the state. But politics isn’t separate and apart from culture, either, and they certainly interact and influence one another. It’s been said that culture is upstream from politics, which is generally true; but sometimes politics is upstream from culture, and politics is often viewed as...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

In Search of a Christian Political Theology: Dominionism, Kuyperianism, and Christian Realism

| 10 min read

Is it not amazing how men and women who profess the same Christian faith can end up coming to such different political conclusions when we vote? How is it that two people who confess Christ as Lord and the Bible as his infallible word end up in such anxious and even vitriolic disagreement? Of course, the causes are many: where they get their news, where they live, where they socialize… For all the new round of stories about “evangelical Christians vote this way,” zip code, it turns out, may be a better predictor of the vote in modern America. Evangelicals...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

A New Year’s Prayer

| < 1 min read

As 2020 draws to a close, take some time to reflect on these words from the prayer of Saint Francis. May this new year be one in which God shapes us to become people who more fully reflect his image in our vocations, our theology, and our culture: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Through the Eyes of Zechariah

| 8 min read

Let me tell you my story, now that I can talk again… I’m an old man, way too old to have an infant son.  But this is what the last year has held.  It’s a year I still don’t understand, and that makes me wonder at what God is going to do with all of us.  A year ago, I was just an ordinary Jewish priest, serving in the temple here in Jerusalem.  There are somewhere between 18 and 20 thousand Jewish priests right now, and we need at most 1,000 or so to do the work of the Temple...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Let Nothing You Dismay: Songs of Hope for Christmas 2020

| 5 min read

In a piece titled “2020 broke Christmas music. Here’s what I’m listening to instead,” Michael Brodeur, the classical music critic for the Washington Post wrote this last week: “What if the songs of the season didn’t demand a mass emotional pivot, the obligations of cheer? What if they let in some of the cold? I’ve found myself hunting for music to store away that might resonate more clearly within the peculiar acoustics of a dark, difficult winter.” Brodeur’s sentiment resonates; December has brought politics, a pandemic, and our own personal struggles, leaving seemingly little room for the songs of the...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Beyond Death

| 4 min read

“Beyond the door, there’s peace, I’m sure And I know there’ll be no more tears in heaven” There are mysteries in this life, questions with answers that are hard to come by, difficult to make sense of, perplexing to live with. The meaning of heaven, and the meaning of earth, are like that. What are they? What do they mean? Can we ever know enough to know enough? This week I have born the weight of death, and of dying. Two phone calls within a few minutes, two dear friends in different parts of the country, one dying unexpectedly in...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Political Discipleship from Two Martins

| 13 min read

A couple weeks ago, we began a short series of posts from TWI looking at what we can learn from church history about how to faithfully follow Jesus in the political sphere, with Kaitlyn Schiess looking at Augustine and the City of God. Our next contributor is Rev. Dr. Michael Allen, the John Dyer Trimble Professor of Systematic Theology at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida. Dr. Allen advances our conversation by moving us forward nearly a thousand years to the time of the Protestant Reformation, and he shared what a couple men from that period–two Martins–have to teach us...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Saint Augustine and the Political Imagination

| 8 min read

Many Christians arrive at the end of this election season with a sense of relief regardless of the outcome. The months (or even years) leading up to the election have been divisive and difficult for anyone trying to live a faithful life in our inevitably political world. Churches, schools, and institutions have spent time during the election season equipping Christians with theological and political principles; pastors have shepherded their people through division inside and outside the church; and individual Christians have navigated the political tensions of their own friends and family. We are tired, frustrated, and very often heartbroken over...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Jesus, Eyes Open

| < 1 min read

Over the past months much has remained the same. For many of us this season has stretched longer than our initial predictions, and then longer than our revised predictions. At The Washington Institute we have striven to engage with our cultural moment, but at times we also dabble in contributing to culture. Several months into this pandemic I wrote this poem after reflecting on the fact that as Christians we believe that one day Jesus’ eyes were closed in the grave, and then in a glorious moment they opened again for the first time and everything changed. May this poem...

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FaithTheological Reflections

After the Flood – The Promise and Perils of Unity

| 11 min read

The aftermath of contentious elections is typically followed by calls for national unity, calls to heal the divisions exposed by the electoral process.  Will it be so in the aftermath of this election?  Early returns are not very good, as the parties seem girded to embrace battle, not unity for our nation.  What will it mean and what will it take to reunify a badly splintered body politic in the United States?  That is a question far beyond me, one for better minds and those more trained in the political world.  Can our nation even be reunified?  I do not...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Revelation: A Competing Symbolic Universe

| 16 min read

I hear the word “apocalypse” in casual settings more than a dozen times each year. It seems that every year there is a “Snow-pocalypse,” by which the evening news means 12 to 14 inches of snow will inconvenience you for about a day and a half.  Or my son might talk about the “Vocabulary Apocalypse,” by which he means a major test that will wreck his grade if he does not do well.  Or, we can think of more popular scenarios like the movie Apocalypse Now.  As a New Testament professor, I find this all very strange. An apocalypse is...

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CulturePopular Culture

Everything is Broken

| 3 min read

A few weeks ago on an early morning drive I listened to Bob Dylan for two hours, the whole way there. Not what I always do, but that day I did. One album that played its way through my mind was “Oh Mercy,” music that I have listened to many times over many years. This is Dylan at his best— from “Political World” which is a perennially important song, as true now as it has ever been, from “Where Teardrops Fall” to “Ring Them Bells,” from “Disease of Conceit” to “Most of the Time” and “What Good Am I?” Musical,...

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FaithTheological Reflections

The Promise and Perils of Faith, Vocation, and Culture: Part II – Suffering for Changing the World

| 8 min read

The New Testament’s Crooked Narrative Arc: In Part I last week, I began by noting that the New Testament is not entirely straightforward when it comes to the subject of faith, vocation and culture. Revelation says that in a certain era — the era in which actual Christians lived — there was a situation where Christians could not buy or sell. In Acts, when Christians impacted culture and economics, it often turned out badly. To this we may add Jesus’s life, which was not exactly “normal,” even by first century standards of a stable society. If his life was merely...

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FaithTheological Reflections

The Promise and Perils of Faith, Vocation, and Culture: Part I – The Danger of Nationalism

| 7 min read

Why do the Old Testament Scholars Get All the Fun? This may sound like a strange thing to say, but I’m jealous of those who get to teach the Old Testament. I get paid to teach the New Testament, which I love doing, but I’m envious of those teaching the Old. Why? When it comes to faith, vocation and culture, they have it easy. Why? There’s immediate payoff for any Old Testament teachers when it comes to faith, vocation and culture. There’s a rather natural narrative arc created at the start of the Old Testament which can then be used...

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CulturePopular Culture

Dickens’ Bleak Vision: Vocation Gone Wrong

| 8 min read

One of the challenges of a proper doctrine of vocation — God’s care for all types of work, their importance, their value, their biblical dignity — is that it so easily slips into a warped, sinful, selfish doctrine.  This shouldn’t surprise us, of course.  Though vocation find its origin in Genesis 2, in the Garden of Eden, before there was sin, we work out our vocations under the curse of Genesis 3.  Our vocations, then, are marred by self, more particularly by selfishness, our twisting of a good doctrine into a curse on others.  Seventy years ago Dorothy Sayers wrote:...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Culture is Upstream from Politics: 50 Responses

| 56 min read

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November of 2016. When I was a boy, my grandfather and I spent summers buying cattle throughout Colorado. Mostly of course, he was the buyer, but there were moments when, with a certain twinkle in his eye, he would let me be the bidder, nudging me to know when to move my hand so that the auctioneer knew that we were still bidding. I learned much that matters from him over the years of being a boy, some of which still runs through my life. For example, in that same time of...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

A Poet’s response to a Prophet

| 3 min read

A Reflection on Jeremiah 29… At first, when I read this passage, I thought I would attempt to write a thorough essay explaining how I, as an African American women, a product of a divorced parent, in one of the largest urban centers in the United States, feel both daily and keenly as if I have been exiled.  I wanted to attempt to explain how God stripped me of all I knew and led me to a community where I constantly question my place, feel deeply alone, and often wonder if I will ever feel as though I belong. However,...

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CulturePopular Culture

On Dragons and More

| 6 min read

“Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon’s lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.” When we read “The Chronicles of Narnia” by C.S. Lewis we find ourselves in the stories; they are about us too. Young and old, British or not, they are windows into what it means to be human, into sons of Adam and daughters of Eve the world over. For that reason, I have read...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Masked Worship: The “Not Yet” of God’s Kingdom

| 9 min read

Early in the pandemic, I concluded A Theology of Incarnation Amidst Online Worship with a premature promise: “When we have the chance, we will return – joyfully – to a fuller presence with each other.  And we are going to throw a great party when we do.”  Premature how?  The sentiment was good, but the idea that the pandemic would be over in a sudden swoop has turned out to be wrong, at least in terms of suddenness.  Many of us fell into the error of thinking, “This will stink for a while, and then it will end.”  There will...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

The Late Great Sunday Service

| 8 min read

Wednesday March 12th. That was the day our church leadership decided to cancel the upcoming Sunday service in response to the appearance of COVID 19 in our county.  The virus, whose impact to that point had been largely minimal in surrounding states, was now at our doorstep, threatening to dismantle church life as we knew it. I must admit, however, despite the uncertainty of what lay ahead and the disruption caused to our usual Sunday service, the move to online church that Sunday brought some unexpected benefits as a leader in the church. Namely, getting up as a family and...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

The Vocation of Historians: An Interview with Sean Michael Lucas

| 9 min read

In his Requiem for a Nun, the poet William Faulkner somberly reminds us that “the past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The persons and events of generations past in many ways are still very much alive, influencing and informing our current dialogues, discussions, and perspectives. Since our understanding of history is so crucial to understanding ourselves and to imagining our future, the need for good historians has never been more important. Recently, I had the opportunity to Zoom with Rev. Dr. Sean Michael Lucas, pastor of Independent Presbyterian Church in Memphis, TN, and Chancellor’s Professor of Church History...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Menial Work Matters

| 9 min read

“Excuse me. Could you spare some change so I can make a phone call?” Those were the first words Marc ever said to me. I heard them as I was walking out of McDonald’s in 2007 while I was in seminary in St. Louis. They came from a disheveled but very polite and articulate black man. Anyone who has spent any time in the city has probably heard the same line from numerous nameless, faceless people. Like most, I too, usually just keep walking. But this time, I took the road less traveled by, and it has made all the...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Reflections on Knowing God & Knowing J.I. Packer

| 11 min read

“I know Mr. Rogers, but does Mr. Rogers know me?” A long time ago one of our little ones asked us this question, perplexed by the technology of television. We smiled as we did our best to wade through the epistemological challenges of being human in the modern world— not laboring very long over them, I confess, as we mostly wanted to honor the very good question it was. How can I “know” someone, if they don’t “know” me? Knowing about is not the same thing as knowing. I can know about the city of Vancouver, without ever knowing what...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Common Grace for a Contentious Age

| 7 min read

The whole secret of the practical success of Christendom lies in the Christian humility, however imperfectly fulfilled. For with the removal of all question of merit or payment, the soul is suddenly released for incredible voyages…And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious. Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be a vice. – GK Chesterton, Heretics, 1905 Humility is in short supply. Even in the best...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Ethics for Exile

| 17 min read

Christianity has always – like any global movement – had different flavors.  Those flavors are often thought of as denominations, but denominations themselves mask a range of variation in how we express our Christianity – cultural variation, theological variation, and almost any other “-al variation” out there.  At a time when one flavor of Christianity (the movement formerly known as “evangelicalism”) has become overly-politicized in one direction and another flavor of Christianity (the movement theologically known as “liberalism”) has become overly-politicized in the other direction, it would be easy for the rest of us to just give up on engaging...

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FaithTheological Reflections

The Beautiful Community: A Conversation with Irwyn Ince

| 9 min read

In our current landscape with COVID-19, the push toward racial justice, and an upcoming election, we are all imagining what a “new normal” might look like, how life might be different (and hopefully, better) when we emerge on the other side of these various crises. Already there is talk of how our workplaces may change as a result of both the pandemic and diversity and inclusion trainings, as well as our institutions such as schools, colleges, and universities. But what about other institutions, specifically, the church? When we envision a new normal for Christianity in America, what do we hope...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Gleaning, Generosity, and Imaging God

| 5 min read

Misfortune Strikes How can I believe that God is in control when so much of our society seems to be coming apart at the seams?  How can I believe God is in control when I can be attacked because of the color of my skin, even if I’m peacefully protesting and clearly within my constitutional rights and obeying all curfew laws?  How can I believe God is in control when my job has disappeared and when a virus is silently skulking through our population – capriciously sparing some and slaying others?  How can I think God is in control right...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Community, Loneliness, and the Frameworks We Live By

| 7 min read

“It is not easy to tell a story, certainly not when you have an indication to run quickly toward a happy ending. How can I find the courage to write stories that don’t fit a pre-fabricated frame?” -Henri Nouwen On the morning of July 1, 2019, I woke up with a pit in my stomach. I had recently completed a rigorous post-graduate fellowship in Washington, D.C., gotten a full-time job, and moved to a new city. And yet, on the morning of my 24th birthday, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong. As I stood weeping...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Knowing the Names

| 6 min read

In recent weeks protests have convulsed hundreds of cities across the United States and the world. These protests have forced consideration of neglected social and spiritual wounds, revealing the unaddressed pain and grief which now pours through the gaping holes of superficial justice. News media and social media have flashed up moments from these protests, some that escalated into violence and mayhem and others that offered extended moments of peaceful demonstration. If you’ve watched videos of the protestors, and especially if you have participated in a protest yourself, it is difficult to forget the sound of a collective group of...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

The Culture is Still Upstream from Politics

| 3 min read

The culture is upstream from politics. Like most words that matter, these are ones worth pondering, maybe even debating. Almost four years ago, just after the last national election in the United States, I wrote an essay born of this thesis, inviting 50 friends from throughout America and the world to respond. I asked them not to enter into the glory or ruin of who won or lost, but to reflect on the harder question, i.e. what does the election say about America, if this thesis is true? If in fact the culture is upstream from politics, what is going...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Tragedy, Tipping Points, and Trust

| 9 min read

September 1, 1989 September 1, 1989 in Brooklyn, NY – a tragedy that I trusted was a tipping point. It was the day before my 21st birthday, and I was mad as hell. The movie of the year for me was Do The Right Thing, by Spike Lee. The song regularly playing on my Walkman was Fight the Power, by Public Enemy. On this day I responded to the call of Sonny Carson, Rev. Al Sharpton, and the New Black Panther Party for a Day of Outrage protest march. A common description of NYC at the time was as “a...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Sometimes You Tear Up the Publication Schedule

| 6 min read

Sometimes you tear up the publication schedule.  Given COVID19, we had an article on loneliness by Molly Wicker planned for this week, and given our emphasis on Vocation, we had an article about the New Testament and Doomsday Approaches by Bruce Lowe scheduled for next week.  Those are now pushed back a week or two because of the protests and the violence that have gripped our nation.  We do not always pick the issues of the day, but today’s issues demand comment. When it comes to this past week’s protests, we cannot take race out of it, because the issue...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Main Event

| 11 min read

Missing The Main Event A few summers ago, one of my sons and I were headed to a concert together. We were on the way, but an accident on the road stopped traffic for about an hour. As a result, we ended up missing one of our favorite bands. We were literally walking up to the stadium as we heard the muffled sounds of their last and best song. We missed the main event. Stuck in traffic.  So common in Washington, DC. In this same vein, a friend of mine tells the story of going to a baseball game.[1] It’s...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Coronavirus and the Two Greatest Commandments

| 11 min read

German churches have regathered for public worship but without singing.  Why? Groups as ideologically varied as CNN and The Gospel Coalition have reported increasing anecdotal evidence that indicates singing together spreads the coronavirus quite destructively, with the case of a Washington State choir practice being one of the most noted.  The National Academy of Engineering, Science and Medicine, New England Journal of Medicine, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Environment International, and the CDC have all released more research-focused treatments that indicate the same.  As all 50 states in the United States have started to regather, at varying...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Prayers During the Pandemic

| 2 min read

In many ways, we have forgotten how to pray — especially to pray with the richness and succinctness of expression of the historic church.  It is reassuring to remember that we are not the first people to face events that disrupt life and bring with them fear, anxieties, and worry. From its earliest days in the book of Acts and throughout the various pandemics of history, the church has faced uncertainty by turning to God in prayer. Paul wrote to the Philippian church, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

When the Psalms Promise Too Much

| 11 min read

In times of crisis, God’s people have always turned to the Psalter, the biblical collection of laments and hymns, wisdom and worship.  As we are temporarily “online only” as a church (out of appropriate deference to civil authorities but even more out of a desire to love our neighbors well), we have been teaching an online adult education class on the Psalms.  The power of their poetry moves our hearts, not just our minds, and we find space to appreciate the holy as their images of God’s care wash over us.  Nonetheless, as we read the Psalms during a rapidly...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Does God Judge Nation-States Today?

| 13 min read

As the US has now tragically ascended to the place of having the most reported COVID-19 deaths in the world — over 71,000 as of this writing, more Americans than died in the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined, as well as in the attacks on 9/11 — the predictable spate of articles has begun, variations on the theme “Can’t you see that God is judging America?”  I remember similar articles and sermons after 9/11, and they have occurred many times before that and since then. Into that milieu, NT Wright published his Time magazine article Christianity Offers No...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

The Seamless Life, A Conversation with Steven Garber About His Most Recent Book

| 8 min read

On a Wednesday afternoon a few days into a new normal brought about by covid-19, I spoke by phone with Dr. Steven Garber – Professor of Marketplace Theology and Leadership at Regent College, founder of The Washington Institute, and author of three books. We started our conversation with his newest book, The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love & Learning, Worship and Work. As with all good conversations, we started in one place and ended in another. Our conversation explored prayer and politics, life and labor, God and grace. Our discussion was wide-ranging precisely because this book, The Seamless Life,...

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VocationOn Daily Work

The Parent as Accidental Educator

| 13 min read

An interview with Byron and Kristin List To the parent who suddenly has the extra, added vocation of being the primary educator for his or her child… Many parents have suddenly become educators, not by choice, but by COVID lockdown. It’s a profession for which we are largely untrained, and we’re trying to do it while also balancing our jobs and our own stress and worry.  And in most cases, it will last at least until June. Many school systems have been up and running with online education for weeks now, whereas others are just beginning the process. But even...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Lessons on Prayer from Daniel’s Life in Exile

| 4 min read

I loved reading the stories of Israel as a child: the heroism of David, the wisdom and fall of his son, the never-ending cycle of good and bad kings, and God’s prophets who reminded his people of his faithfulness through it all.  I would always get excited when we got closer to reading about Israel’s exile because that meant that we were getting closer to the prophet Daniel – my namesake. As an American Christian born in the 90’s my life has not held many things I could compare to Israel’s exile. It is one thing to understand that God’s...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Rhinos, Hedgehogs, and Snakes – Navigating Life Together During COVID-19 Lockdowns

| 7 min read

You’ve probably seen the speculation – will social distancing lead to a baby boom or a divorce boom ten months from now?  For those who live with family or roommates, the lockdown has a paradoxical effect, isolating us from so many of our friends but isolating us with our immediate household or roommates.  The extroverts are going crazy because they can’t get out to see people, and the introverts are going crazy because they’re stuck inside with people!  No doubt, this has allowed many of us to reconnect with loved ones… and no doubt it has also given us the...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

A Theology of Incarnation Amidst Online Worship

| 6 min read

Due to the rapid spread of COVID-19 our church, like many others, has made the choice to worship fully online for the time being.  For many who are only used to “big church” life this can be quite an adjustment.  This past Sunday, the four of us in my immediate family worshipped in our living room along with our church body spread out across the DMV (District, Maryland, and Virginia) area.  Our usually packed facility had only a few people present: James, preaching that day; Rob, leading liturgy; Jeff, leading singing; Jon, running tech; and only a few more.  Yet...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Nehemiah and the Amazing Technicolor Career Choice

| 6 min read

When faced with a large number of potential careers, young adults are often paralyzed by the choice.  They so often want to “not get it wrong” that they can find it almost impossible to make any choice, often running to others to make the choices for them.  The problem, of course, is that in the end no one else can – or at least should – do that for us.  In the end we must make and own our own vocational decisions.  I do a lot of career advising, using various assessments to help people think through which careers might...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

David Foster Wallace and Worship

| 10 min read

“What’s with the singing?” A year or so ago I was talking with a non-Christian whose husband had started coming to my church, and she was very skeptical of this whole Christianity thing.  Of the many questions she asked, one surprised me a bit until I thought about it.  She asked, “What’s with the singing?”  In other words – “I don’t get you all worshiping, singing songs to and about someone you can’t see or touch; it doesn’t make any sense to me.  That’s just weird.”  And it does seem odd, until you get inside it.  But when you do,...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

John’s Credit Cookie

| 6 min read

You and I have both been leaving a movie when a surprise scene after the credits shows up – a “credit cookie.”  You may think these are a modern development, but filmmakers have been doing them for years. Wikipedia gives me a list of some of the most known: Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Muppet Movie (1979), Airplane (1980), The Cannonball Run (1981), Masters of the Universe (1987), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002), Daredevil (2003), Napoleon Dynamite (2004), and X-Men The Last Stand (2006).  More recently, Wiki notes that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has made...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Metanarrative and Narrative

| 5 min read

Words we live by— metanarrative and narrative. Most of us find it possible to get on with our lives without using those two words every day, if ever. But whether they make their way into our minds, we live with them from morning to night, as their realities are integrally woven into every heart. Everyone everywhere lives out their meaning, whether we do so consciously or not. The first word is born of the belief that there is a story that shapes human life under the sun. Whether we are premodern, modern, or postmodern, whether we are Hindus, evolutionary materialists,...

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CulturePopular Culture

Vocation and Choices in “It’s a Wonderful Life”

| 4 min read

“At crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over.” How else do we explain the choice of a boy, amidst the glory of fun with his friends, jumping into a frozen creek to save his little brother from drowning? How else do we explain his choice as the delivery boy for the local drug store to bear psychological and physical hurt to protect a customer from the horror of a poisonous prescription? How else do we explain his choice as a young man to give up his long-planned trip around the world to keep the...

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FaithLiturgical Reflections

Marley was Dead

| 6 min read

“Marley was dead… as dead as a door nail.” With those famous words we enter into one of the best-ever stories, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens. It is read and read again the world over during these days of December, and in theaters small and large we are offered one more take on this story of one man’s long, dark night of the soul. The question at the heart of Dickens’ novel is simple, even if incredibly complex. What does it mean to see? But to press the point: why is it so hard to see, to see ourselves...

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CulturePopular Culture

To Keep on Keeping on

| 5 min read

To keep on keeping on. I first remember seeing those words in a “head shop” in Berkeley in the glory days of the counterculture, and they have run through my heart ever since. Mostly playful at the time, with perhaps a little hippie hope built into the graphic of a cartoonish character making his way through life, I took the words more seriously, wondering even then about the challenge of keeping at it, of staying the course… to keep on keeping on. Years later this grew into the very heart of my own vocation, and I spent ten years in...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Seek the Flourishing of the City, Again and Again

| 3 min read

“Take Idaho” was the way my sister-in-law Kathryn Elliott Stegall put it so very poetically as she mused over our longing to see all things well in the world. But the world is large, and how on earth do we ever have the ability to take it all in? None of us can care for everything everywhere. So we choose– and Kathy imagined the relative smallness of Idaho to be a way to care about something somewhere. I thought of that this week while getting to know two men who have chosen a people and a place near the Rift...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Clowns of God

| 3 min read

Like many, many others, I have long loved the work of children’s author and illustrator Tomie De Paola, and particularly how he includes insights into his Italian heritage and his vibrant Catholic faith through simple story-telling. A Mormon friend introduced me to his book The Clown of God, which ably introduces the concept of vocation to young children, which I have come to see as a vital task of Christian parenting. Retelling an old French tale, de Paola situates the story in the southern Italian town of Sorrento at the beginning of the Renaissance. Giovanni is a parentless child who...

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Culture

Food in Life, Life in Food

| 3 min read

I love food. I love to eat food. I love to work with food but I think most of all I like to see food as my partner in serving, caring for and bringing delight to those I love. It brings me so much joy to work with all the beautiful, flavorful, abundant and edible things on this earth. I am always the one that stops when cutting up fruit salad and points out the beauty in what we’re dealing with. Like why is it so gorgeous?? The colors in a watermelon. A kiwi. Honeydew. Cantaloupe. It’s so pretty. But...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Implicated in the Way the World Turns Out

| 7 min read

We owe a debt to those among us who have the ability to detach themselves from the era in which we live and help us see the defining characteristics of our age.   That’s why I love David Brooks’ columns, and listening to Ted Talks and reading theology.  And while there may be many ways to describe the sea we’re swimming in today in 2017, I think we can all agree that it doesn’t take a lot of detachment to call this an age marked by deep division and polarization.  Ironically, maybe that’s the only thing we could all agree...

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CulturePopular Culture

On Response and Responsibility

| 3 min read

“I am coming to see that it is not so much a question of finding the right place, the right time, the ideal marriage. Neither life nor happiness hinges upon such things. It is wholly within. It is response to what is given. It is choice.” So reflects Anne Delaney in the novel, Strangers and Sojourners by Michael O’Brien, the book at my bed-table these midsummer weeks. I have read thousands of pages of his over the last few years, each one a very different story with very different people. This one is set in British Columbia during the middle...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Very Beautiful, Very Broken

| 3 min read

Which way should I go? That isn’t the only question human beings ask, but it is a common question, and given who I am and what I do, it is a question I hear most every day in one form or another. Born from a complex of questions about the meaning of our lives, about the nature of vocation— who am I? what is life about? what is my life about? what should I do with my life? — it is one that every one of us asks along the way. For the last couple of days I have been...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

For My Pleasure

| 4 min read

Gretta: “I told you, I write songs from time to time.” Dan: “Well what do you write them for?” Gretta: “What do you mean what for? For my pleasure.” The film “Begin Again,” from which the above dialogue is taken, centers on the making of an album by a burned-out record producer and an artist who never intended to take the stage. The film circles around the question put forth in this bit of script above: What’s it for? Why are you doing what you’re doing? Throughout the film, the effects of different motivations toward the work of the music...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Shadow and Light

| 3 min read

Shadow and light. Watching the mysterious interplay between the sky and the grass, the trees and the flowers, I found myself thinking about the way shadow and light makes its way through life for every one of us. We live amidst both glories and ruins, all day long having to make sense of the very beautiful and the very broken… and the metaphor of shadow and light reflects that reality in its own limited way. Two phone calls today reminded me of a time a few years ago when three good friends and I were invited to speak together in...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Cracks in Cascadia — and Yet

| 2 min read

Cracks in Cascadia — and yet. I spent a day in Portland, a long day but only one day, one more time entering into the hope and work of the Murdock Trust. While I have been drawn in for most of twenty years, invited into its counsels about ideas of all sorts, for several years now I have served as a senior fellow for the Trust. Mostly I am asked to listen in, and with the other fellows, respond to the questions and concerns that are at the heart of the Trust’s life. It is a very unusual foundation. On...

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CulturePopular Culture

How Long Must We Sing This Song?

| 4 min read

“O God, I would bring before Thee tonight the burden of the world’s life….”* I have spent much of life walking into the rooms of the world, asked to speak into the questions of the human heart. Who are we? What is the world like? What do we believe about the world, and what difference does it make? How are to live and labor and learn? And on and on. A few years ago I was introduced by a good man whom I know well, whose invitation was to speak to people who in their own ways had come longing...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Work Well to Rest Well

| 4 min read

Growing up, my folks instilled in me a respect for Sunday, the Lord’s day; though not as extreme as some of my friends at church. Our morning usually consisted of Sunday school, church, and then the same fried chicken and fried okra at the same restaurant, washed down by sweet tea and Ms. Missy’s pie. Our afternoons were made up of football, naps, and playing outside, with a Sunday supper thrown in at some point. Dad has always been a small business owner, and despite the great opportunities that Sunday held, he kept his business closed on the Sabbath. Now...

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FaithTheological Reflections

Seeing Seamlessly

| 3 min read

“If we lose God in the world, we also lose meaning and purpose, accountability and responsibility.” When I first read Vaclav Havel arguing this stark thesis, I was intrigued— more than that, I was dumbstruck —having read enough of him to know that he made no profession of faith, a theist of sorts perhaps, but more intellectually than religiously. The Czech playwright who became a prisoner who became a president seemed to me an unusually honest man, someone willing to see where the lines-in-the-sand are; in a profound sense, to look into the abyss of a godless universe, and not...

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

On Planting Trees

| 4 min read

“I’ve planted four trees in our yard this year.” Words, words, and more words…. so many words. Mostly we forget them, and perhaps we should. But some words stick, defining our days, sometimes our lives. We have been making a decision over the last ten months, slowly coming to see its hope and meaning, and in the last few days have decided to accept the invitation to join the faculty of Regent College in Vancouver, BC, an appointment which will begin this fall. Some things we know, which draw us in, and some things we don’t know, and we can...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Rest: Making the Top Ten

| 3 min read

 “Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy, as the Lord your God has commanded you. You have six days each week for your ordinary work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath day of rest dedicated to the Lord your God.”  — Deut. 5:12-14 (NLT) As a Fellow, rest is not something I come into contact with very often.  When I do, it’s like a chance meeting with a long lost friend.  I miss them, but I know it’s unlikely that I’ll see them again anytime soon and don’t know how to reincorporate them into my life. I really would love to have a quality...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Completing Capitalism

| 3 min read

What is business about anyway? What is its point? Most of ten years ago I was invited to a breakfast with two executives from the Mars Corp who wanted to talk about an idea. We began with what seemed a very unusual question: how much money should Mars make the next year? And as I asked questions about that question, the conversation moved to a criticism of Milton Friedman, the father of the modern marketplace whose paradigm has shaped a generation and world, arguing that the sole purpose of business is to maximize shareholder profit. When I asked “Why are...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Loosening Perfectionism’s Grip 

| 4 min read

This past holiday season, I had the joy of performing one of life’s most satisfying but irritating tasks: stringing up Christmas lights.  The frustration begins right off the bat with figuring out how to untangle them.  Then, you need to make sure they all work (because there is always that one broken bulb that ruins the whole bunch) and figure out how to replace it.  Finally comes the task of repeatedly wrapping a long string of lights around something over and over again.  For me, placing the ornaments on the tree was always much less stressful and more enjoyable. This year,...

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CultureChristianity & Culture

Where Human Beings Love to Live

| 4 min read

“I choose not to walk by it….”  Ashley Marsh, Opelika, Alabama, 21st-century “Having heard all of this, you may choose to look the other way…but you can never again say that you did not know.”  William Wilberforce, London, England, 18th-century This past week I was drawn into a wonderful, even if weighty gathering, the Local Shalom Summit, hosted by some good folks in Stanford, KY. The second oldest town in the state, it grew up on an ancient trace, becoming the Wilderness Trail in the 1700s, connecting the “east” of Virginia and the Carolinas with the “west” of Kentucky and...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The Beauty in Waiting

| 3 min read

Mikel Bulgakov’s Russian masterpiece “Master and Margarita” follows the Devil, Woland, and his minions as they descend upon Moscow to terrorize, destroy, and uproot society. However, despite his unsettling violence, Woland ultimately serves as a force of good and truth for the Russian people. Bulgakov uses Woland to uproot truths about the corrupt, oppressive reality of USSR’s government and society. Woland’s mischief provides multiple venues for Bulgakov to satirically highlight the USSR’s many violations of basic political, social, and economic human rights and fundamental freedoms. By interacting with the devil, Russian writers whose literature deceive the public by falsely glorifying the...

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CulturePopular Culture

Not a Typical Love Affair

| 3 min read

“Do you read Camus?” I love film, but it is hard to find films that I want to watch. Even with almost boundless choices, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Prime and more— including the local theaters —I can look and look, and still not find what I’m looking for. I want the story to be about things that matter, but I also want to smile. Though I am willing to take in the stories of unmitigated sorrow sometimes, I cannot do that all the time. And sometimes I am simply glad to be glad. But most of the time I need the...

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Institute for Faith Vocation Culture

FaithTheological Reflections

The Ordering of Our Loves

| 3 min read

Ordo Caritatis. Some words and ideas are worth holding onto, especially ones that take us to deeper places of the heart, that ask us harder questions of the heart— and even more, ones that offer the hope that all is not lost, and that our fragmented selves can be reordered, that we can be made new. For a very long time some of the most thoughtful people in the world have been asking about the ordering of our loves, seeing in that task the most important of all questions, i.e. who are we and how shall we live? We do...

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VocationVisions of Vocation

Vocations as Sacramental Signposts

| 4 min read

I began with the sainted story of California. Like all of life, and the history of every people and every place, the story of California is a complex one, even a messy one. On the one hand, what we know best is from the perspective of the Europeans who came from Spain in the 17th-century. Some were missionaries like Father Junipero Serra who walked from his ship in the gulf of what we now call Mexico to the capitol city of New Spain, Mexico City, up through Baja California into Alta California, beginning in San Diego on the north, establishing...

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Institute for Faith Vocation Culture

CultureCurrent Conversations

A Terrible Beauty

| 3 min read

Intractable. It is a hard word, and one we wish wasn’t. Whenever we find ourselves needing that word, we are in a miserable place. Sometimes marriages seem like that, and we can see no way other than more sorrow. And sometimes work bring us into messes that we groan over, knowing that there is only more mess ahead. Then sometimes the issues are more social and political, even global, ones that pit people against people, histories against histories, hopes and against hopes. Yes, “intractable” is the word. And I heard that word too many times this week— but it is...

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FaithTheological Reflections

On Faith

| 3 min read

“Do you have faith?” We were sitting in a cafe for lunch today, talking about the world and our place in it. A generation apart, she came to Washington a few years ago, and works on international human rights questions, hard questions that they are. This question mattered to her too. I looked back across the table, and then around the room, “Everyone here has faith. Every man and woman in this room believes certain things are true, and certain things are not true. We have metaphysical commitments about the meaning life, about the nature of the universe, about who...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Loving Your Neighbor 101

| 3 min read

After years of barbarianism and violence in the Promised Land, we finally see a glimpse of hope in the Book of Ruth. If the world had more people like Ruth and Boaz, it might be a better place today.  Ruth fled the protection of her clan in Bethlehem and clung to Naomi, certainly not for self-advancement or a means of protection, simply out of love and respect. Ruth was a profound woman.  She felt no shame in performing menial tasks; there was no question of loyalty for some better elsewhere.  She was living out her life as God designed, in...

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VocationOn Daily Work

Good Work Matters for Everyone Everywhere

| 4 min read

And the doors clanged shut. It is only grace that makes it be that I haven’t spent most of life in prison. The few times I have walked in, I have walked out. A long time ago now, I was asked to spend a week of my 19 year-old summer with a group of juvenile delinquents, as they were called, in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. I did, and still remember some of those days, and nights. Hope and longing, anger and hurt, hikes up and down the trails, and a visit to the state prison nearby. It was...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

The With-ness of God

| 3 min read

Around 6th grade, my family bubble wrapped and boxed everything we owned of great value and absolute necessity. We were making our way across the Red Sea. The Moses in my mother shared the revelation of the promised land just blocks away. Where bikes left unattended were not in danger of being taken and sirens no longer battled with the natural sounds of nature. Two stories high, four bedrooms, two living rooms – we were moving to the land that, from our vantage point, was flowing with milk and honey. I had never been more proud to bring home friends....

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VocationFinding Your Vocation

Learning to Learn About Things That Matter

| 3 min read

Yesterday I spoke at Friends University in Wichita, a school in the Quaker tradition. A glorious building was imagined, and then brought into being in the late 19th-century to house this hope for educating the next generation of “Friends,” as they called themselves. For a time it held more floor space under one roof than any other educational facility west of the Mississippi River. I was drawn in because they have been reading the Visions of Vocation— administrators, faculty, students and board of trustees —and we spent a day talking about what its thesis would mean for them. It is...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

Even Proximate Justice Is Hard to Find

| 3 min read

Proximate justice, one more time. I walked into a familiar classroom this morning, one where I spent many hours over many years. And as I prepared to begin, I saw an essay I had written some years ago, “Making Peace with Proximate Justice” on the desks in the room filled with students from all over America. For the next two hours I lectured to the American Studies Program, welcoming them to live and learn in Washington DC, setting before them the challenge of doing so in an increasingly pluralizing, secularizing, and globalizing world— but before the time was over working...

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FaithBiblical Reflections

Ruth In, Syrians Out

| 3 min read

In and through the sheltering and kind presence of God, Ruth is given the grace to devote herself fully to work.  The scripture says, “So she came, and she has continued from early morning until now, except a short rest.”  I do not think this passage alone justifies stringent versions of the Protestant Work ethic.  Using one verse to justify peculiar doctrine is dangerous anyway (i.e. cult formation).  Nevertheless, I believe this passage beautifully illuminates how desperately we need God’s presence in our work and how with his presence we can be amazingly diligent and work to our best ability....

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Institute for Faith Vocation Culture

Culture

God-Fearers Respond to Economic Injustice Promptly

| 4 min read

Fear of God  The starting point for living a moral life begins with fearing God.   Fearing God does not mean having a boogeyman-type fear of God; nor does fearing God mean He is like Little Bunny Foo Foo, a rabbit who went about bopping field mice on the head. God will not bop us on the head with a billy club.  To fear God means having an awe and reverence for God, our Creator.  To fear God means recognizing that we have an audience of One 24/7.  As a seminary professor put it, to fear God means recognizing that, “there is...

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CultureCurrent Conversations

We the People… One More Time

| 3 min read

“It always makes sense to tell the truth”– Vaclav Havel, 1936-2011. Hard as that is for each of us, it is only compounded when all of us lie. The personal is one thing, and it matters very much; the political is another: there the problem of lying is more horrible because more people are affected. Almost a year ago I got off the plane in Prague, and was welcomed into the Vaclav Havel International Airport, which delighted me because I had flown there to walk his streets, to see the balconies from which he spoke. For two days, I did...

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CulturePopular Culture

On “Silence” and More

| 5 min read

“But did he hear their screams?” My wife Meg is named after two martyrs who lost their lives during the horrible “killing times” of Scotland in the 17th-century. Two Margarets, one an older woman and the other a girl, were staked in the bay as the tide came in, condemned to death for their refusal to forsake their faith. The older Margaret was placed further out with the perverse hope that her death would persuade the younger Margaret to give in. Neither did, and almost 300 years later Meg was named Margaret in honor of these courageous women, hearing the...

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FaithTheological Reflections

And Crying Too

| 3 min read

“Here am I, O God, of little power and mean estate, yet lifting up heart and voice to Thee before whom all created things are as dust and vapor. Thou art hidden behind the curtain of sense, incomprehensible in Thy greatness, mysterious in Thine almighty power; yet here I speak with Thee familiarly as child to parent, as friend to friend. If I could not speak to Thee, then I were without hope in the world. For it is little that I have power to do or to ordain. Not of my own will am I here and not of...

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Institute for Faith Vocation Culture

FaithTheological Reflections

On Laughter and More

| 4 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 its meaning.” When I first read those words, I was struck by their hard-won wisdom. Milan Kundera, one of the great novelists of the 20th-century, wrote about the challenge of being human in the modern world, embodied in Prague under the weight of totalitarianism, the “totalistic” worlds and worldviews of Naziism and Marxism. Perhaps best known for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, his subject was always the world that Nietzsche had warned about a century-and-a-half earlier— that when we...

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Liturgical Reflections

Gary Black on Why “Silence” Matters at Christmas

| 8 min read

Now, but not yet. Everyone everywhere, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve that we are, sees the same world, and tries to make sense. We don’t have to be philosophers to do that; in fact sometimes philosophers miss it badly. What is required is that we be human beings— ordinary men and women who live in ordinary places taken up with ordinary responsibilities. The same world? Yes. Any honest person acknowledges the good that is there. Kindness and beauty, generosity and hope, these run through our lives, sometimes only small streams, but they are there. A surprising smile, an...

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