Death and resurrection. It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. Baptism declares that God is in the business of bringing dead things back to life, so if you want in on God’s business, you better prepare to follow...
If religious patriarchy was true, the angel of the Lord would have spoken first to Manoah about the miraculous conception of Samson. Instead, he spoke to Manoah’s wife—a woman—alone (Judges 13:2-24). If religious patriarchy was true, the angel Gabriel would have...
Easter is about love and truth. Easter says that love is more powerful than failure, bigger than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer. Easter says you can bury truth in the grave, but you can’t keep it there. He is risen.
The Bible says that Jesus wept when He saw Mary weeping over the death of her brother. It records that Peter denied Jesus three times on the night of Jesus' arrest. When it dawned on Peter what an abject failure he was, he went out into the night and wept. Tears say...
All four gospels witness to Mary Magdalene as the premier witness to the resurrection - alone or in a group, but in all cases named by name. . . All four gospels insist that when the other disciples are fleeing, Mary Magdalene stands firm. She does not run, she does...
The novelist Pearl Buck argued that artists are people who tend to be extremely sensitive to any emotional input: "The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them, a touch is a blow, a sound is...
Blessed are the agnostics. Blessed are they who doubt. Those who aren’t sure, who can still be surprised. Blessed are they who are spiritually impoverished and therefore not so certain about everything that they no longer take in new information. Blessed are those who...
Those who wish for a scene to continue without change are certain to be complicit in smothering it to death. Genies are not it the habit of returning to life in a bottle. from Smash!
Beware systems and identities that need: 1. A Strongmanand2. A Scapegoat There will be no end of violence when these two exist. They legitimate and fuel each other. Jesus demonstrates how demonically futile the Strongman/Scapegoat mechanism is in his death and...
I go in pilgrimageAcross an old fenced boundaryTo wildness without ageWhere, in their long dominion,The trees have been left free.They call the soil here “Eden”; slants and steepsHard to stand straight uponEven without a burden.No more a perfect garden,There’s an...