As one gets ready to become a Christian, a tough question is asked: “Do you renounce Satan and all his pomps?” Some have substituted “empty promises” for the better “pomps,” but that is sad, because it misses the force of what we need to do when we renounce this particular diabolical temptation. We need to renounce the showy fakery of worldly power in order to worship God: we trade the merely gilded for the golden. Christians turn their backs on... Read more
As a quick glance at my profile at different times in my life would show, I don’t like excercise, but I (sometimes) do it. As a lover of meat, I don’t like the vegan fast of Lent, but it is good for me so I do it. Work is a joy, generally, but every profession contains the job part of work where one suffers like Job with the parts of the job that are tedious. No complaints, just longing for... Read more
Growing up, Dad would talk to my brother Daniel and me as we walked home from church about how he saw the world. He was a pastor and part of his job was keeping up with world affairs best he could. He was (and is!) a wise man and so often would anticipate issues we both have faced our entire lives. One strength of all the churches he pastored (and of our own present parish) was that they were a... Read more
What is happening? What is God doing? We ask this question at times of great blessing and joy. What could we possibly have done to merit this? Most often, we do not count our blessings, but do count our pains. This is natural, but when we ask about either joy or pain, why doesn’t God always speak? Often we ask and sometimes God tells us. Some people hear God speak and Christians call those people prophets. The job of a... Read more
Children should be taught the virtues of good people and as they grow, learn that, like all of us, nobody this side of Jesus was perfect. Even great saints had foibles. We all pray for mercy. Yet some people get “the big thing right” in their time and so transcend their errors. They grow over the course of their life and become better than they were. Abraham Lincoln was such a man. He never became perfect and even as President... Read more
This year I teach some Lincoln, Douglass, and Booker T. Washington: heroes, even if flawed, because they got the big moral struggle of their time right. They are inspiring to read, but to understand how decent people could resist the power of the truth for so long (even to this day), I decided to read some of the best of Southern writings, including the belle of diarists, Mary Boykin Chesnut. Mary Boykin Chesnut shows people are sometimes better,or at least... Read more
If you have a taste for Victorian novels, and you should, then Pachinko shows that the form is still alive. Forget curmudgeons: not only do “they” still write them like they used to do, but modern authors could teach some of the lesser Victorian lights a thing or two. If he could, even Dickens would learn something from Min Jin Lee’s multi-generational story of a family of Koreans and their complex twentieth century relationship with Japan. This is not Tolstoy,... Read more
2018 presented a calendar gap for Christians. 2017 was universal Easter where everybody had a party on the same day. This year the wounds in the church show, the West looks for sunrise a bit early. For the orthodox, this is Palm Sunday. For most Americans, today is Easter Day. To the American majority, I say: “He is risen!” For the rest of us, the global church, those who worship in solidarity with the persecuted East where Jesus was born,... Read more
If you are Hope, the Fairest Flower in Christendom, and you face Jamaica’s sun, then you need an umbrella. This is not good or bad, just what is true. Umbrellas, especially on beaches, especially on trips, are not always something a woman has with her even if she is generally prepared. What is a lady to do? She borrows an umbrella. It is not her umbrella, she has a different umbrella at home, but the umbrella that is coming is... Read more
Some people are so interesting that anything is better if they are there to talk to you about it. Karen Swallow Prior watched the movie I wish I had seen when I went to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri. At the very least she has a standing offer for a glass of orange juice at The College to talk about the movie. Her review is worth reading, considering, and savoring for its own sake. She made obvious what a fine motion picture Three Billboards might... Read more
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