Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

Yesterday we took our new puppy, Roosevelt, to be neutered.  (Now, with both a Carter and a Roosevelt for pets, we have a truly bipartisan household.) Our five-year-old son, after hearing our attempt at an explanation for why Roosevelt had to be neutered, said, “Mommy, why do only the dogs who don’t get their balls…

The below video appeared on Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish“- another of Alan Watts’ transformative lectures set to pictures.  It’s worth your two minutes watching it. Watts begins by posing this question to his students:  “What if money was no object?” Sullivan, quoting Chris Higgins, writes: “A central realization, which Watts alludes to here, is that…

The night Paul LaRuffa was shot five times in cold blood would have been like any other.  He had closed up the restaurant and gotten into his car.  That’s when “before I could start the car or do anything, the window next to me just exploded and shattered glass all over me with the first shot…And…

In his book, The Road to Missional, Michael Frost describes the experience of wandering through the Vatican Museum in Rome to stumble upon an eighth-century mosaic fragment that depicted Pope John VII wearing not a shiny, gold halo but a simple black square.  Taken aback, Frost inquired of his tour guide: weren’t all halos those…

Have any of you been following the news around the recent discovery of a fourth-century papyrus fragment that mentions Jesus’  wife?  The veracity of the papyrus is apparently dubious at best; but this hasn’t stopped Harvard professor Karen King from seizing on the new-found Gospel of Jesus’ Wife as a fresh spring for research insights (or, the…

Once again, in the spirit of an Andrew Sullivan “mental health break,” today’s musical feature is Mumford & Sons’ cover song for their newly released album, Babel:  like many of the band’s songs, “I Will Wait” has, I suspect, deeply theological undertones; and, as one fellow groupie puts it, “they have spirit!” Here are the…

And, finally, my review of Rachel Held-Evans’ latest book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, which aired on Sermons That Work two days ago and is reprinted here with the permission of The Episcopal Digital Network: If “biblical womanhood” were a rutabaga, then Rachel Held-Evans, in her newfound, tongue-and-cheek praise of womanly domesticity, would slice and dice it until it…

The other day a pastor friend asked if I’d like to help her preach on Stewardship Sunday.  A kind but dubious invitation which I agreed to with a level of trepidation.  That’s because anyone who has been around the church on Stewardship Sunday knows it’s that day on the church calendar when we pastors prostrate…

The form of sermons has become this week’s focus with students in Preaching 501 with preacher and teacher Tom Long.  I’ll soon be listening to my students preach, some for the first time; and when they preach, their sermons will probably take on diverse forms. And, in case you’re wondering and your wondering is causing…

The Nester’s “31 Day Challenge” has inspired fellow saint and sinner Tammy Perlmutter to blog thirty-one days straight about the laughter, surprise and heartbreak of living in intentional Christian community.  Jesus People USA seeks to live out the kind of New Testament model of a family of believers that theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer holds up in his book,…

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