In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, 5 when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up — for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; 6 but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground — 7 then the... Read more
Note: This post is part of our Lenten study of Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s book Natural Spirituality: Recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity. Links to the previous installments in this series on “Jungian Spirituality” will be included at the end of each post in this series. In the evangelical Christianity of my childhood, the major turning point in someone’s spiritual journey was “accepting Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior.” Once you believed that “Jesus died on the cross for... Read more
For Lent, I preached a five-part series on Jungian Spirituality, based on Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s book Natural Spirituality: Recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity. The following is a brief description of each of the sermons in this series: Confronting the Unconscious: From Supernatural to Natural Spirituality We should be extraordinarily careful about attributing causation to God and meaning to events. And I am, by no means, promoting a variation of the harmful canard that “everything happens for a reason.” But, at least... Read more
As Easter approaches, I invite you to consider that we should worry less about what people say they believe happened one Sunday morning 2,000 years ago and more about we are living as if resurrection still happens. Along these lines, Clarence Jordan, one of my heroes and a twentieth-century Christian saint, said, The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is... Read more
UPS just delivered my copy of the new Flannery O’Connor prayer book, published by Paraclete Press. I’m looking forward to spending the next week praying through it. There are morning and evening liturgies for each day. The choice to include only morning and evening prayer comes from a letter O’Connor wrote about her personal spiritual practice that was collected in The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor: “I say Prime in the morning and sometimes I say Compline at... Read more
(David Benner, Spirituality and the Awakening Self: The Sacred Journey of Transformation, Brazos Press, 2012, 240 pages) I had not heard of David Benner prior to being invited to review his latest book, which is my loss. It turns out he is a well-respected author and editor of more than twenty books at the intersection of psychology and spirituality. And his new book comes with recommendations from Margaret Guenther and Tilden Edwards, two writers on Christians spirituality I have long... Read more
Note: This post is part of our Lenten study of Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s book Natural Spirituality: Recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity. Links to the previous installments in this series on “Jungian Spirituality” will be included at the end of each post. 18 Moses said to God, “Show me your glory, I pray.” 19 And God said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘I Am’”…. 20 But, God said,... Read more
(Ronald J. Sider, Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget, InterVarsity Press, 2012, 171 pages.) The title of this post could be seen as flippant, callous, arrogant, or all of the above — implying that an “Evangelical Christian Worth Listening To” is such a rarity as to be worthy of remark. Well, in an age in which many conservatives exclusively watch Fox News (read: “Faux News”?) and read The Wall Street Journal, whereas many liberals watch MSNBC and... Read more
Note: This post is part of our Lenten series on Joyce Rockwood Hudson’s book Natural Spirituality: Recovering the Wisdom Tradition in Christianity. Links to the previous installments in this series on “Jungian Spirituality” will be included at the end of each post. 5 One night they both dreamed—the cupbearer and the baker of the king of Egypt, who were confined in the prison—each his own dream, and each dream with its own meaning. 6 When Joseph came to them in... Read more
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Jesus’ Subversive Donkey Ride (A Progressive Christian Lectionary Commentary for Palm Sunday)
In Mark’s fast-paced style, we see three different days of Holy Week in chapter 11 alone. The first eleven verses are what we celebrate as Palm Sunday. But in verse 12, we see a clue (the words, “On the following day”), which indicate that the events regarding the fig tree and the aggression against the Temple happened the next day. Monday continues through Mark 11:19, where we read that, “when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the... Read more