The Scriptures function as the script of the worshiping community, the story that narrates the identity of the people of God, the constitution of this baptismal city, and the fuel of the Christian ima...
I think we should first recognize and admit that the marketing industry—which promises an erotically charged transcendence through media that connects to our heart and imagination—is operating with a...
But once, in the light and warmth of an autumn afternoon, this writer saw on the bench of a public square, in a poor Parisian suburb, an old and poor couple. They were sitting hand in hand, in silence...
But once you realize that we are not just thinking things but creatures of habit, you’ll then realize that temptation isn’t just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it’s often a factor of de-formation...
There are no box seats at this table, no reservations for VIPs, no filet mignon for those who can afford it while the rest eat crumbs from their table. The Lord’s Table is a leveling reality in a worl...
Analysis of the story will sometimes undercut our antepredicative grasp of it).
With hands raised, the minister extends God’s welcome and blessing to the gathered congregation, who may receive the welcome and blessing with hands open in a spirit of mutual welcome and expectation.
When we gather, we are responding to a call to worship; that call is an echo and renewal of the call of creation to be God’s image bearers for the world, and we fulfill the mission of being God’s imag...
Those evangelicals who have been raised and shaped by forms of Christianity that are roughly fundamentalist will either: a. become taken with the modern moral order and thus sort of replay the excarna...
Our wants and longings and desires are at the core of our identity, the wellspring from which our actions and behavior flow.
It is Augustine who is really the patron saint of the Reformation – and only because the Reformers saw Augustine’s theology as a powerful expression of a robustly Pauline theology. So without wanting...
In short, God’s welcome is a gracious way of reminding us of our utter dependence, cutting against the grain of myths of self-sufficiency that we’ve been immersed in all week long.
But it is a principled pluralism because it simultaneously argues that all confessions and directional orientations should have the same opportunity and access. And so it ends up making a meta-argumen...
A biblical passion for justice as shalom might be precisely what pushes us to refuse this merely procedural standard of justice. That is not license to confuse the state with kingdom come, but it is a...