One of the interesting things about reading a lot of preacher blogs is that you’re usually acutely aware of the lectionary passage for the week. Yesterday’s, apparently, was the parable of the sower.
I have always found this parable uncomfortable because, even in my most ardent days, I secretly suspected myself of being stony ground. [...]
It may be true, as Benjamin Franklin’s famous epigram has it, that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. For me, though, it’s easier to see God in fruit.
Many years ago, I happened to visit a vineyard in late August, close to harvest time. The wide [...]
Ann Voskamp posted a photo essay on the way love transforms an object’s aesthetic qualities. I don’t know whether her photos or her prose are more beautiful, and luckily I don’t have to choose.
I’ve read that all that is necessary to form a club is someone to keep out. Milton of Don’t Eat Alone reflects on Jesus’ ability to turn that notion on its head, as He did so many others:
When we speak of Jesus, we often say he was “fully human.” I think he loved people [...]
This post by Real Live Preacher hit me pretty hard, and not only because it is an exquisitely-written essay:
You are the person who is defined by what you choose and what you truly desire and what you really think and believe. That’s who you are. If you want to begin any kind of spiritual or [...]
My spouse asked me yesterday what I thought of the recent discovery of a Hebrew stone tablet, dated well before Jesus’ time, that references a messiah figure being resurrected after three days. I don’t think that the spousal intent was to rattle my cage, exactly, but it may have had more than a little [...]
Rev. Lamblove, in his continuing series on “How to Preach Real, Relevant, Relational and Revolutionary Sermons,” encourages preachers to ask questions that they don’t already know the answers to. Frankly I think this is fine advice for any conversation about faith. Maybe that’s because I personally have far more questions than answers.
A real [...]
This is what a struggle does: it pares you down to the essentials. Milton of Don’t Eat Alone writes movingly about his ongoing daily decisions to keep going:
Therefore, I have to decide what it means for my life that I live with depression. I have to decide whether my faith or my illness [...]
I live in CA, and the editorial pages are filled with comments about the same sex marriage court decision and campaigns to change the CA constitution to overturn this. A striking number make claims, biblical and personal, that the notion of certain forms of marriage are God ordained. Like crusades, jihads, millions of petty cruelties [...]
I have admired some of my hosts posts about her struggles with faith, mine are ancient, and not resolved in ways that I think would aid her. I moved far away from church and organized religion in my mid teens, after being an obnoxious brat of a choir boy earlier. [...]
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