In a few weeks I’ll be participating in the sixth annual Mockingbird Conference in New York City. The mission of Mockingbird Ministries is to connect the Christian faith to the day-to-day realities of life. And culture in all its diverse forms is the means by which we life out our daily lives. This year’s conference will feature author Mary Karr and Pastor Tullian Tchividjian, my pastor and boss at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and with LIBERATE. Go here for more information... Read more
So allow me to do a little crowd-sourcing here. I’m speaking on a panel this Friday at the regional AAR meeting, on the topic, “What Else? All the Ways to use a Ph.D.” I’d be very interested in hearing from anyone who is using their Ph.D. in religious studies, theology, ethics, biblical studies, etc., outside the traditional academic world (i.e. as a professor in a higher learning institution). If you are one of these people, I’d love to hear anything... Read more
When Pope Francis I declared, in his introductory sermon, that the Catholic Church would be a church, not just for the poor, but of the poor, I wondered how this could be possible. I’ve read enough of Jon Sobrino, the remarkable El Savadoran liberation theologian, to know of the powerful reformational, justice-oriented strain within the Catholic theological tradition which proclaims the necessity of the church to be a church of the poor. A church in solidarity with the marginalized, the oppressed, the... Read more
Now that Lent is giving way to the main event of Easter, the Feast of the Paschal Lamb can become an easy Easter dinner with this recipe for awesome lamb chops. Especially if you’re one of those people who goes to church on Easter, you can put this together in time for lunch. The first thing is to go to Trader Joe’s and get their New Zealand rack of lamb. It comes vacuum sealed like so much of TJs food,... Read more
The confrontation between Elisha and Naamen in 2 Kings 5 is one of the more provocative texts in all of the Scriptures. In this short chapel devotion given at Knox Theological Seminary in December, I reflect on perhaps the most difficult and often-overlooked aspects of this story ( v. 15-19), in which Elisha blesses Naamen’s vocation. Meditated on in the context of Holy Week, these surprising verses remind us that our vocation is one that we will often “suffer,” yet Christ... Read more
A painting is not its interpretation. At the moment it encounters me in the art museum, a painting exists for me. But it does not need me. It exists for me in a particular way, a way that challenges my control, rendering me receptive (i.e., passive). T.S. Eliot once said that the meaning of a poem exists somewhere between the poem and the reader. And so it is this “space between” that the painting creates, transforming me, if only briefly, from a... Read more
Wake Forest University president Nathan Hatch, marking the Sesquicentennial of Boston College, made a few remarks on the case for religion in liberal education. Among them: The mystique of digital connection keeps us in a constant state of anticipation and interruption. When a beep goes off, our first obligation is to respond. William Powers has written an interesting book on this subject: Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age (2010). There he warns that a... Read more
Envy is as old as humanity itself. In the first utterance of the word sin in Scripture, a man had two sons; two brothers who come to grief over, of all things, an offering given to God. “Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground. Abel brought the firstborn of his flock and their fat portions. The LORD looked with favor on Abel, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.... Read more
Rublev Fasts Andrei Tarkovsky’s epic film, The Passion of Andrei Rublev (1966) is a Lenten film par excellence. It depicts the spiritual struggle of one of Russia’s great cultural heroes, the painter of icons Andrei Rublev (1360-1430), who is most famous for his stunningly original, The Holy Trinity (c. 1420). Although I wrote about the movie here at CULTIVARE a few months ago (“Art and Grace“), it continues to shape and challenge my thinking about art and faith. Tarkovsky narrates... Read more
What are we going to do about all those fired-up youngsters who are running around trying to save the world (and acting like they have only four minutes to do it)? There has been a sea-change in the church. Like so often happens, Christianity seems to be swinging over to a concern with social justice and activism–at least among the young ones. But what happens when all these energetic, passionate, globally-concerned Christians realize that they can’t actually save the world? When... Read more
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