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.
Here we are at the end of the year, a lot to reflect on, a lot to be thankful for, and one of those things is Thanksgiving itself. Who’s excited about Thanksgiving?
Unless you live under a rock, you know that the second most anticipated endorsement of the presidential election finally happened: Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris. Don’t hold your breath for the most anticipated: I won’t be making an endorsement. (And maybe you shouldn’t either.)
Society, even that of what once was Christendom, is not Christian. Exhibit A: the Olympics’ opening ceremony’s now infamous scene mashing up Greek mythology, Christian iconography and drag queens. If Christendom is now Inclusivedom, though, could Christians at least get a serving of the inclusivity pledged in this society’s creed?
As the multitude of cicadas sang briefly across the nation this past month, a storm blew one of them onto my path. Strange as it may sound, as I witnessed that little bug struggle through the aftermath, I was given a masterclass on dealing with my own storms.