The Proper 10 Year C gospel from Luke is one of Jesus’s most beloved parables. Is there any parable more familiar than the story of the Good Samaritan? And is there any parable whose message is more difficult to live out? Jesus uses the story to illustrate mercy, the second virtue in the prophet Micah’s directive to “do justice, love kindness/mercy, and walk humbly with your God.” Jesus agrees with the man who concludes that the true neighbor in the... Read more
One of my most effective attention-getters in any given class is to point out to a bunch of 18-21 years olds that unless there is a major breakthrough in medical technology in the next few decades, we know one thing to be true with certainty. Within 100 years, everyone in this classroom will be dead. Mortality is an inexcapable feature of being human, a feature that I’ve been thinking about more recently. One of the few remaining vestiges of my... Read more
Jeanne was away for most of the last ten days with her sister in Brooklyn who is dealing with some serious medical issues. Finding myself alone with Bovina in the summer is different. During the school year I always have work piling up, classes to prepare for, meetings to attend, and grading to do. But my courses for the fall are already set to go, I just finished going through the draft of my next book one more time, and... Read more
Today’s reading from the Jewish scriptures contains many powerful lessons that remain relevant thousands of years later, including some important truths about faith, human nature, and class distinctions. Along the way, it also shows how important it is to listen to the people in your life, even those whom you doubt have anything important to say. Naaman was a powerful and important man, the head general of the armies of the king of Syria to the north of the kingdom... Read more
Christianity, or any branch of it, loses its Christian character when its self-proclaimed supporters outnumber and outshout its actual adherents.~Marilynne Robinson Is the United States a Christian nation? Attempts to answer this disputed question usually focus on specific language in the founding documents of the United States, quotations from the correspondence and essays of the Founding Fathers, what percentage of the citizenry identifies as “Christian,” and individual interpretations of history. It’s a familiar debate in which the various sides tend... Read more
I ran an informal experiment on Facebook not long ago, the point of which was to see how quickly it would take people to get upset and defensive over something that, arguably, is not worth getting upset or defensive about. It’s shocking how easily I can be entertained, especially when seeking to avoid more important things that I should be doing or thinking about. I posted that There are two kinds of people. People who back into parking spots and... Read more
Throughout the gospel lectionary readings in Ordinary Time, Jesus regularly says surprising things that contradict our traditional notions of proper ethical behavior. Here’s a section from my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Philosophy that explores this issue. The gospel readings during Ordinary Time regularly include difficult teachings from Jesus. For instance, in the Proper 7 Year A reading from Matthew [last week], Jesus says that I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against... Read more
Some time ago I read the first few pages of Greg Epstein’s Good without God. Epstein is the Humanist chaplain at Harvard University; Jeanne gave me a heads up after she heard him being interviewed on NPR. I appreciated the first few pages of Epstein’s introduction, where he takes the new atheists to task for their failure to take religious belief seriously, but it was Epstein’s definition of God that fully caught my attention. Humanists believe that God is the... Read more
A couple of weeks ago in the morning I was greeted in the driveway with Luther having a completely flat tire on the passenger front side (Luther is the name of our 2013 Ford Fusion—long story). We have the highest level of Triple A coverage, so I could have just called them and waited for some young punk to show up and put our donut spare tire on so I could drive to the local tire store (which has taken... Read more
Today’s lectionary readings contain two of my favorites, both from the Jewish scriptures. The story of Elijah running for his life from Jezebel is part of my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Phlosophy, as I posted late last summer. Get Up and Eat But today I focus on Psalm 46, which reminds me of a meaningful encounter with a deer while on retreat, as I described three years ago. As the deer longs for streams of water, so my... Read more
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