Your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions. This, promises the obscure prophet Joel in the Hebrew Scriptures, will be one of the signs that God has “poured out [his] Spirit upon all flesh.” Exactly what I would expect a prophet to say. Unsaid, however, is that in the meantime “your old women, your young women, and your middle-aged men and women will roll up their sleeves and get shit done.” The tension between visionaries... Read more
What do you do when virtually all of the evidence relevant to an important matter points toward a specific conclusion, but you strongly believe that this conclusion is wrong? We live in a cultural climate in which, for many, intuitions and feelings regularly override even the most objective collection of facts. Still, it is worth considering whether there are times in which even those who still are willing to accept the authority of objective facts over individual feelings or intuitions... Read more
The summer Sunday gospel readings annually are full of Jesus’ greatest hits, including feeding the five thousand and walking on water. Matthew’s treatment of the walking on water scene is on tap in this coming Sunday’s gospel. The feeding of the five thousand is the only pre-resurrection miracle that is recorded in all four of the canonical gospels; Jesus walking on the Sea of Galilee is in all of the gospels except Luke (maybe Luke wasn’t there?). What makes the... Read more
Happy August! This month marks the 11th anniversary of the “Freelance Christianity” blog, something I never would have predicted when I first started. When I began this project, it was clear that only my immediate family and maybe a dozen friends and colleagues were reading it–now thousands of readers visit and comment every month. To mark this auspicious anniversary, here is (by several thousand visits) the most popular essay in Freelance Christianity’s history. It’s from 2019, and a lot has... Read more
When we first moved to Rhode Island in the middle 1990s for my new teaching position at Providence College, Jeanne landed a position as the office manager in the Admissions office at PC. She bonded with her boss Bill, the Director of Admissions immediately. This was not surprising, since Bill was a New Yorker through and through just as Jeanne is. Bill had little tolerance for inefficiency or indirectness. One of Jeanne’s favorite Bill quotes: “If I ask you what... Read more
I am not a regular reader of Christianity Today, but the title of Jon Ward’s 5/11/22 article caught my eye. Ward is the chief national correspondent for Yahoo News; the title of his CT article is “Being a Political Journalist Made Me a Better Christian.” CT presents itself as a primary media voice for evangelical Christianity; knowing that, as Ward describes, “many conservative Christians are told that the media is evil—almost as bad as Democrats, or maybe worse,” this title promised... Read more
Every teacher knows about helicopter parents. Most of us, teacher or not, intuitively know what helicopter parenting is; here’s a definition produced by my research assistant Google from one of the dozens of relevant online sites: Helicopter parenting most often applies to parents who help high school or college-aged students with tasks they’re capable of doing alone (for instance, calling a professor about poor grades, arranging a class schedule, or managing exercise habits). For Baby Boomers who are still young enough... Read more
There is a saying, particularly popular among conservatives, that “A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged.” I am a liberal, but cannot challenge the alleged truth of this saying since I have never (thankfully) been mugged. In more than six decades of experience, however, I have had plenty of opportunity to wonder about an important question that this saying raises for everyone, regardless of political or social commitments—What happens when ideology runs headlong into real life? I got... Read more
One Sunday morning a number of years ago, I noticed that a reproduction of a familiar yet peculiar painting was propped up on a stand at the base of the reader’s lectern. The reading from the Jewish scriptures for the morning was the following familiar passage from Isaiah: The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid; the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The... Read more
I have two book projects in the works these days. I just finished a full rough draft of the first book and have turned it over to a few trusted friends and colleagues for review and input. While that’s going on, my thoughts turn to my second book project, one that I’ve had in mind since before the pandemic. Tentatively titled Nice Work If You Can Get It: Lessons and Stories from a Life in the Classroom, the time has... Read more
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