The Significance of Saturday

Today is Saturday. It’s the day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Does today have a name? Easter Eve? Easter Saturday? No, apparently that’s the Saturday after Easter. Even if it has a name, no one that I know does anything religious on it. A lot of churches have Maundy Thursday services, and a...

Las Vegas and Our Culture of Violence

Note: This is adapted from a 2015 article I wrote after the massacre of nine African-Americans in a Charleston church. Sadly, I didn’t have to change much to adapt it. Once again we are reeling in the aftermath of another mass killing, the worst one in U.S. history. As usual, we also have to listen to the...

Orlando and a Call to Creativity

We have to do something. If all we do is square off in our respective corners—Christian/Muslim, gay/straight, gun control/right-to-bear-arms, Democrat/Republican—then all that will happen is we’ll shout at and past each other, no one will win, everyone will lose, and it will happen again. After a while...

“Pure in Heart”–But Not Perfect

I once had a conversation with a friend who told me, quite seriously, that the first humans had photographic memories, had an endless supply of energy, required little to no sleep, and lived for centuries. It was only after the Fall that our memories started to fade, our energy lagged, we started needing...

Brooding Spirit of Creation

Theologians like to use sophisticated words like “transcendence” and “immanence” when talking about the fact that God is outside of the world yet continually active in it. The ancient Jewish writers of Scripture, however, talked about the same things by painting word pictures. Word pictures are much cooler...

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