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Fellowship of Saints and Sinners

Her name was Damaris.  Ever wondered about her?  She appears in the form of an afterthought, (one of Luke’s “oh, by the way” comments), as one of the “few” who believed upon hearing Paul’s speech in the Areopagus (Acts 17:22-34).  Some biblical commentators guess that to have been mentioned as a woman she could only have been…

Not too long ago 29,000 Somali children were reported to have died from starvation, the crackdown in Syria and bombings in Libya continued, and the unemployment epidemic in our own country persisted in the face of debilitating squabbles in Washington. And, in a car driving north on I-75, half-listening to the headlines on NPR, I…

  Epektasis: it may sound like a venereal disease, but it is actually Latin for “perpetual progress;” and it has been around since the fourth century whenGregory of Nyssa coined the term as a way to explain his understanding of true perfection in the spiritual life.  True perfection, for Gregory, consisted not in reaching some elusive, Platonic…

Garrison Keillor read this poem by Wendell Berry on yesterday’s “The Writer’s Almanac”: IX. I go by a field where once I cultivated a few poor crops. It is now covered with young trees, for the forest that belongs here has come back and reclaimed its own. And I think of all the effort I have wasted and…

Tucked away in the apostle Paul’s first letter to Timothy (1 Timothy 2:15) is the strange declaration that “women will be saved through childbirth.”  The New Revised Standard translation puts it this way:  “Yet [she, the woman] will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.” Scholars have virtually tripped…

I have a weakness for James Bond flicks.  Apparently the poet May Swenson does, too.  Her below poem, compliments of The Writer’s Almanac, provides a helpful framework for thinking about a recent church worship experience and its implications for Christian spirituality: The James Bond Movie by May Swenson, from New and Selected Things Taking Place The popcorn is…

The other day I was listening to an NPR interview with the writer Hisham Matar, whose latest novel,Anatomy of a Disappearance, draws from his own experience.  Matar’s father, a dissident under the regime of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, mysteriously disappeared while in exile in Egypt more than twenty years ago.  It was later discovered that…

The sixteenth century father of Protestantism, Martin Luther, knew that human beings simultaneously crave and rebel against freedom. We find it difficult to be free even when freedom is the very thing we are in search of: we enslave ourselves and others with all kinds of dictates and systems of oppression- sometimes in the name of…

Here is a conversation starter:  Where did you last experience “grace” and what did it look like? In the spirit of Stanley Hauerwas’ latest book, Working with Words, which is one Christian theologian’s exploration of language about God, I want to propose a conversation around “grace” and where we encounter it in the world.  This is not a…

Then Moses climbed Mount Nebo from the plains of Moab to the top of Pisgah, across from Jericho.  There the Lord showed him the whole land…Then the Lord said to [Moses], ‘”This is the land I promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’  I…
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