The Bible is replete with excellent sources for preaching and teaching about the dangers of climate change, and I hope you have found some useful ones in my previous five essays on the topic. Today I will conclude my biblical perusal by looking at the New Testament epistles. I hope to show that in these ancient letters there are fabulous insights that a preacher may tap to address the theme with energy and authority. If we believe with the old... Read more

By my own rough count, I have written for Patheos seven essays on a biblical text for the Day of Pentecost. I have not gone back to read those articles—there is something about reading one’s earlier work that causes bad cases of hives—but I can bet that many of them focused on the Genesis tale of the Tower of Babel; I do, after all, look first and most longingly at the Hebrew Bible offer of the day. This year on... Read more

“Divinity is not playful,” claims Annie Dillard in her fabulous 1975 Pulitzer-Prize winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. This lovely book, one of my very favorite reads of the past 50 years, has energized me about the natural world in more ways than I can count. Still, I must disagree with her in this quoted point; I think divinity is in fact quite playful, as She/He creates and sustains the cosmos. Such playfulness is more than evident in the extraordinary passage... Read more

I think I claimed in my last essay that the Sixth Sunday of Easter presented the final text of Revelation that we would be dealing with this year. I was quite wrong! Here in the seventh Sunday of Easter, the final Sunday before the Day of Pentecost, we have one more text to address from John’s Revelation. I admit readily that I have long thought the final verses of the book to be rather anticlimactic. After the many number games,... Read more

The news from the planet grows more calamitous each day. Today I read that we face the extinction of nearly 1,000,000 species within the next few decades, the sixth mass extinction event in the history of earth, the first such in the span of human history, and that our land surface has been 82% degraded in ways that will lead to more heat, less water, and more dangers for countless plants and animals, including us. Climate change is real and... Read more

We conclude today our six-week foray into the enigmatic, and endlessly fascinating, Revelation of St. John the Divine, to give its lengthy official title. As I have already stated, there are very few reputable scholars who still argue that any known author named John, most especially the writer of the fourth Gospel, actually penned this book. This John is sui generis, steeped in the Greek Old Testament, fully acquainted with the various number and letter games of apocalyptic literature, ever... Read more

The impetus toward doing something serious about the threat of climate change appears finally to be building. This is very welcome news! Just yesterday, one of the 20 (!) announced candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, Beto O’Rourke of Texas, presented a $5 trillion (yes, with a “t”) plan to wean the USA off fossil fuels completely by 2050 and even suggested several ways in which he would pay for it. Most of the other candidates make regular comments... Read more

Earlier in our perusal of the enigmatic book of Revelation, I promised that I would unpack that most infamous number found in Rev. 13, 666. You would be hard pressed to find many in our culture who have not heard of this number as the very essence of mystery and evil. Just what can we make of it, and what does it have to do with the overall meaning of the book? I think the answer is a clever one,... Read more

Last night I watched two episodes of a fabulous documentary on Netflix entitled “Our Planet,” narrated by—who else?—the redoubtable David Attenborough. It has the usual spectacular photographic insights into the world of animals and plants in remote spots on earth, but it has much more, something that we all must hear now, no matter how hard it is to hear it. There was one incredible shot of about a half million walruses, long tusks and all, crammed on a tiny... Read more

In this third installment of my series on the book of Revelation, I want to focus my attention on the text in Rev.7 within the context of the next several chapters, since the ongoing drama of the book cannot be evaluated without a longer look than one part of a single chapter. Commentary on Revelation has been vast and quite distinctive, moving from the notion that the book presents a cyclic movement of repeated ideas for emphasis to one where... Read more