The way the world’s supposed to be. Is there a world like that? Do we know? How would we? What does it mean? These are the greatest questions of life, and ones that we answer very differently, given our deepest commitments about the meaning of life, our beliefs about God, the human condition, and history. [Read More…]
Thankful for Good Neighbors
November 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Neighbors by choice. There is nothing magic about it, though I am sure there are mysteries in it. Mostly it is about ordinary people who have ordinary lives who live in ordinary places, like many, many other before us. For most of life, Meg and I have lived this way, choosing our neighbors before we [Read More…]
A Glimpse into The Gathering
November 4, 2015 by Leave a Comment
The most beautiful, and the most broken, all together— making sense of both is the question of my life, and of every life. A little while back I was in Dallas, Texas, taking part in the Gathering, an event that is hard to describe. It is difficult to even imagine that it happens. Once a year [Read More…]
The Good Work of the Praxis Labs
October 28, 2015 by Leave a Comment
What makes good work good? A lot could be said, and has. But it’s a question I’ve been asking for most of my life— because it matters to all of us, for all of us. In every time in every place, human beings give most of life to labor. What do we do? and why [Read More…]
Conversations with Consequences
October 21, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Conversations with consequences. A few weeks ago I was staying up on Lookout Mountain, a rangy ridge that runs through the southeast, bordering Georgia, Alabama, and Tennessee. For fifty years the northern tip, looking over Chattanooga, has been the home to Covenant College, a liberal arts school brought into being by Presbyterians, Scottish Calvinists with a [Read More…]
The Way We See, and Why
September 30, 2015 by Leave a Comment
“When we describe, we do so as active agents whose intentions and moral character pervade our descriptions.” So wrote Greg Jones in Transformed Judgment: Toward a Trinitarian Account of the Moral Life. For some years now I have thought about his insight into the human heart, into the way we see, and the why of the way [Read More…]
Our Questions, Our Callings, Our Committments
September 23, 2015 by Leave a Comment
It was a Donegal year.Before 1972 I’m sure that I never heard the name, but before the year was out, I had seen a Donegal in Pennsylvania, and another on the western coast of Ireland. Very different places, but the first an echo of the second, clearly a way for the Irish immigrants who made [Read More…]
A Prayer for Labor Day
September 9, 2015 by Leave a Comment
A prayer for labor, for the loves and the longings woven into the very work of our work. “O Lord and Maker of all things, from whose creative power the first light came forth, who looked upon the world’s first morning and saw that it was good, I praise you now for this light that [Read More…]
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