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...
Continue Reading
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....
Continue Reading
“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...
Continue Reading
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...
Continue Reading
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,...
Continue Reading
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...
Continue Reading
