The season of Epiphany, squeezed in between the Christmas season and Lent, is the annual liturgical celebration of Jesus’ coming out party. The gospel texts over the next few weeks will follow Jesus as he calls disciples, performs miracles, gets thrown out of his hometown synagogue for claiming to be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah, and delivers the Sermon on the Mount. Today is the first Sunday of Epiphany: on tap in today’s gospel is Matthew’s account... Read more
Last May, I wrote about the often-made claim from evangelical Christians that they are the most discriminated against group of people in the country. That essay was my fourth-most-viewed blog post of 2019–Enjoy! Are Evangelical Christians Discriminated Against? The Dangers of Tribal Christianity Read more
For the next several Thursdays, I will be reposting my top blog posts of 2020, judged by the amount of traffic generated by each essay. Coming in at #5 on the list is an essay from last August in which I describe what happened when I posted a map on Facebook. Not just any map mind you. This map showed what North America would look like if several northeastern, northern midwest, and northwestern states currently in the United States of... Read more
Yesterday was the Feast of the Epiphany, the first day of the liturgical season that celebrates Jesus’ coming out party. It reminds me of the Sunday several years ago when I had a real epiphany . . . —“It’s the cold mornings that it’s the hardest. You want nothing more than to wake up in your own place, look out the window, make some coffee, and not have to go anywhere.” –“They’ve given me 10 days. Who the hell can... Read more
In final preparation for the spring semester that will begin in ten days, I am reading the final few essays in Michel de Montaigne’s monumental Essais, the fascinating book that will be the central text in an honors colloquium on Montaigne and his 16th century world that I will be teaching for the first time. I am regularly amazed by just how relevant Montaigne’s reflections from more than four centuries ago are to our contemporary world. Case in point: Montaigne’s... Read more
On New Year’s Day, I wrote that my New Year’s resolution this year is to take seriously how a ninety-year-old monk described me when he signed one of his many books of poetry for me: To Vance, a man who dreams but never wastes time. As I have thought about the challenge of being both a dreamer and a person who gets shit done, I have been taken back to texts both familiar and unfamiliar from the Jewish scriptures. The... Read more
On this third day of the New Year, I am grateful for many things–including the fact that my blog exploded into an entirely different level of readership during 2019 (double the traffic of 2018, which had been my best year)! Over the next few weeks I will be sharing the “Best of 2019” essays from “Freelance Christianity,” beginning today with #5 on my “most read and visited” list. Last August, President Donald Trump suggested in an impromptu press conference on... Read more
There are eight to ten movies that Jeanne and I watch religiously during the Christmas season, from the obvious (“It’s a Wonderful Life,” “White Christmas”) to a few that are not as well-known. We ended our annual Christmas movie-watching binge on Christmas Eve this year with one of the lesser known films, the 2006 French film “Joyeux Noel.” One of my favorites, this film is a fictionalized account of the 1914 Christmas Truce that spontaneously occurred in numerous places along the... Read more
About halfway through his lengthy essay, Schjeldahl notes his agreement with one of Weil’s most striking claims. “Simone Weil,” he writes, “said that the transcendent meaning of Christianity is complete with Jesus’ death, sans the cherry on top that is the Resurrection. I think so.” In one of the “coincidences” that happen so often that I do not believe them to be coincidental, I discussed the very passage from Weil that Schjeldahl is referring to in my blog post... Read more
This Christmas season seems more dissonant than most, with violence across the globe, an impeachment trial looming in the Senate, and jostling for air space with department store muzak and familiar stories from the pulpit. But the juxtaposition of promise and death, of expectation and suffering, of order and chaos, is nothing new. This dissonance is built into the fabric of the stories that we tend to tell selectively and sanitize for public consumption at this time of year. Today’s... Read more
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