When Pope Francis passed away, some people asked me for an evaluation of his pontificate. A few days have passed since. Our Catholic friends finished their mourning period, and the conclave starts tomorrow, so now I think it’s the right time to share my thoughts.
This week, a Christian friend shared a new claim about an alleged health cure based on an event that never happened. Another shared what the briefest of searches would have revealed was a falsehood about a political foe. The short-term “win” is often a long way from the truth.
Pope Francis has died. We should all pray for his eternal rest and that perpetual light shine upon him, as we should for everyone who leaves this life, both as a spiritual work of mercy and in hope that having reached Heaven, in part through our prayers, he will intercede for us.
Is it acceptable to admit I’m conflicted? In our polarized society, it may not be, but I am. I’m talking about the president’s Easter Declaration and feel utterly conflicted about it.
I’ve only heard nonsense from David Bentley Hart. He tries to cloak an argument for universal salvation in Christian language, an endeavor popular to our cultural ears and foreign to God’s Words.
Ash Wednesday is meant to be a journey of repentance, taking us through the things that we struggle with and reminding us who our God is. That might not sound like the most uplifting thing at first, but it’s actually It’s something that I think is crucial for us to understand what God does for us and how He cares about us and how He’s with us.
It feels like the news cycle has been particularly wild since I happened to start preaching through Psalm 8 in mid-January. Busyness has a way of making us forget where we really are. This Psalm from King David seeks to help remind us of how things really are.
It’s New Year’s Day. As a kid, I noted it as the day Christmas ended. The music cut off on the radio, the lights went off around the neighborhood and, curiously, the snowmen came down all over, too.
In Austria, 206 years ago this Christmas Eve, one of the most enduring religious (as opposed to secular retail) Christmas songs was sung for the first time. In Athens, Ohio, 10 years ago, I did what I used to do every year after Christmas Eve midnight Mass (no longer held at midnight, I’m sad to say). Savoring, yes, the silence of the night, I would take a long walk through town, breathing it all in and thinking of a place now all buttoned up for (as Clement Moore put it in a poem published five years after the introduction of “Silent Night”) “a long winter’s nap.” Students mostly gone home, residents in their houses enjoying their own Christmas traditions, there were quiet and peace.
Does joy end when the clock strikes midnight, closing out Christmas Day? Tim Butler’s new twelve days of Christmas devotional booklet the Joys of Christmas, which is our Christmas gift to you, invites us to embark on a journey to “store up” Christmas joy well beyond December 25. Following the Medieval meditative list known as the Joys of Mary, often encountered through the carol of the same name, we will explore a total of thirteen “joys” that all of us can experience from the life of Jesus.