Over the past several months I have occasionally accompanied Jeanne to a local Lutheran church where has been a regular for a while. They are in between pastors; the interim pastor is a “retired” Lutheran minister who stepped into the void which in many churches can take a long time to fill. Pastor Dan is a gifted sermonizer, courageous in his public commitment to justice, and a person whom I intend to get to know better over the coming weeks.... Read more
When the Spirit Groans In a recent episode of one of my favorite podcasts, “Everything Happens,” Kate Bowler interviewed one of the great Christian theologians of his generation, N. T. Wright. I’ve always thought of Wright as important, but a bit too conservative for my taste theologian. In my Easter blog post last year, I wrote the following: According to New Testament scholar and theologian N. T. Wright, “The practical, theological, spiritual, ethical, pastoral, political, missionary, and hermeneutical implications of... Read more
This coming Sunday is Transfiguration Sunday, the last Sunday before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. Each of the synoptic gospels, including today’s lectionary reading from Matthew, tells essentially the same story. Jesus takes his inner circle of Peter, James, and John to the top of a mountain where suddenly Jesus has a conversation with Moses and Elijah, while “his face shone like the sun and his clothes became dazzling white.” The disciples are understandably frightened, but Peter still... Read more
Man is in his actions and practices, as well as in his fictions, essentially a story-telling animal. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue I run into issues related to storytelling all the time on this blog. Although the name of the blog is “Freelance Christianity,” and it is published on Patheos’ “Progressive Christian” channel, I regularly attract comments from readers who do not fit those categories by any stretch of the imagination. Occasionally, someone using arguments and language I recognize from my... Read more
In her spiritual memoir Still, Lauren Winner begins a brief chapter on prayer by noting that “it is easier to read about prayer than to pray” (tell me about it), then describes the results of a fifty-year-old study of children and prayer, the aim of which was to discover how children’s concepts of prayer evolve as they grow older. The results of the study reveal a hierarchy similar to Kohlberg’s stages of moral development, in which children’s ideas about prayer... Read more
The reading from the Jewish scriptures for this coming Sunday is from Genesis 45 when Joseph, after several chapters of making his brothers’ lives miserable, reveals to them that he is indeed their lost brother whom they had sold into slavery when he was but a youngster. The story of Joseph, among other things, is a story of radical forgiveness. In my forthcoming book A Year of Faith and Philosophy, I consider the story of Joseph’s fraught relationship with his... Read more
Do not letthe sun go down on your wrath. Ephesians 4:26 Although I have been largely successful in carrying out my commitment to not getting sucked into the daily black hole of bad news since the November election, the daily barrage of bullshit from Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their minions is not easy to completely ignore. Anger and hate, two feelings that are not natural to me, regularly threaten to percolate to the surface. My Facebook acquaintances, whom I... Read more
An Abiding Suspicion . . . A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions, and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity. Lawrence Kushner Once several years ago Jeanne and I were in the car listening to the hourly news update on NPR. As usual, they were trying to stuff as much horrible news as possible into a three-minute segment. Ebola, ISIS, Zika, Palestinians, Israel, Istanbul, Russia, illegal immigrants,... Read more
Human love in the purest forms we can know it, wife and husband, parent and child, has the aura and the immutability of the sacred. Marilynne Robinson I’ve often heard it said (and may have complained myself a few times) that Valentine’s Day both is a creation of Madison Avenue and is primarily for the young. It is indeed a big money-maker, and I remember clearly how Valentine’s rituals were forced on me as early as first grade as we peered into... Read more
Beautiful Souls Because I’m a romantic at heart, I’ll be posting two Valentine’s Day-themed posts this week. It’s my small contribution to pushing back against the disturbing news and events that threaten to overwhelm us every day. In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, we might ask What makes a human being beautiful? What is it that we love when we love someone? These are questions that Marilynne Robinson explores in her 2020 novel Jack through a very unlikely romance. Both Jack... Read more
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