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....
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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 –...
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Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wisely observed that the most segregated parts of the American week were Sunday Mornings. Despite his exhortations to bring different races together, this is largely still true today, and the effects are tragic.
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