O Lord, mercifully receive the prayers of your people who call upon you, and grant that they may know and understand what things they ought to do, and also may have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.  Amen. BCP Read more

Summer’s in full swing, syllabus for a course on Paul’s Pastoral Theology in construction, some editing of manuscripts, some writing and some grandson-baseball games. All in all, a good week. America’s #1 Fast Food restaurant? When it comes to fast-food restaurants, consumers have picked their favorite: Chick-Fil-A. With a score of 87 out of 100, the American Customer Satisfaction Index’s Restaurant Report 2018 named Chick-Fil-A a crowd favorite for the third year in a row, followed by the group of “all other... Read more

You Don’t Have to Look Far to Find Trouble (by Mike Glenn) Rabbis tell a story about the day God pinned everyone’s troubles up on a big board for the whole world to see. God gave everyone in the world permission to go up to the board and pick the troubles they wanted to live with. According to the rabbis, each person went up and picked their own troubles. After seeing what everyone else had to live with, each person... Read more

I recently read through Benedicta Ward’s new book book, Give Love and Receive the Kingdom, a collection of essays and papers. The topic is English spirituality, but it’s early English or Anglo-Saxon spirituality and not modern stuff at all. She focuses on Bede the Venerable and Anselm of Canterbury but there’s plenty more, like St Cuthbert, 12th Century hermits, Julian of Norwich and preachers (Lancelot Andrewes, Jeremy Taylor, Mark Frank) and a little about John Bunyan. If anything, these essays model... Read more

Well, perhaps not so much the end of the flood as the last post on the new book The Lost World of the Flood by Tremper Longman III and John Walton. As Old Testament scholars they have explored the ancient Near Eastern and biblical context of the flood narrative in Genesis 6-9. The book works through this context. Tremper and John are convinced that the flood story has a real event behind it. They are also convinced that the author/compiler... Read more

https://soundcloud.com/user-212639123/1-2-thessalonians-in-the-story-of-god-conversation-with-john-byron-kr-98/s-JMpB3 Hope is essential to the Christian life. Like the Thessalonians, we’re sometimes tempted to lose hope and give up. It’s in such situations that these ancient letters find new life. Paul’s letters to the Thessalonians are often overlooked, but they’re essential for the church today. In addition, John Byron brings out numerous important themes in these short letters. Buy 1 & 2 Thessalonians Story of God Commentary by John Byron >> amzn.to/2NLFW2i Read more

It is common to say there are Realists and Utopians. Some say the two ends of the Christian and War spectrum are Just War and Pacifism. It’s not that simple as there are significant agreements between both sides and no Christian should want violence. But it is worth examining what Just War is, whether most wars are “just,” and how Christians are to be involved in war. We turn again to Eric Seibert’s new book, Disarming the Church. What is Just... Read more

Isn’t the Bible enough? Well yes, but the two are not really separable. I recently received a copy of a new book Early Christian Readings of Genesis One by Craig D. Allert due for release July 24th. The opening chapter of the book immediately caught my eye: Who are the Church Fathers and Why Should we Care? A great question – and Allert provides some great insights. The Protestant approach, at least for many of us, is rooted in sola... Read more

What does it mean to call Dietrich Bonhoeffer an apocalyptic ethicist or theologian? Philip Ziegler, in his new important study on apocalytpic theology, Militant Grace: The Apocalyptic Turn and the Future of Christian Theology, contends against the grain that Bonhoeffer (=DB) was an apocalyptic ethicist. Is Bonhoeffer’s moral theology apocalyptic? This question is unsettled from L front to back. The texts that constitute Bonhoeffer’s Ethics are unsteady though well-worked fragments of the actual theological ethics he hoped to write. More unsettled... Read more