Persecuted—or Just Whiny?

A few years ago I attended a pastor’s roundtable luncheon with about a dozen other pastors. We would meet 3-4 times a year, have fellowship, enjoy a nice meal in a private room at a nice restaurant, and then have a discussion on some topic related to the contemporary church. This particular luncheon was a...

Pursuing an Impossible Future

Walter Brueggeman, in The Prophetic Imagination, points out that the defining characteristic of the biblical prophets was not the ability to predict the future, especially not in the Nostradamus-type way that we tend to think of it in modern times. Neither was their role primarily that of acting as the...

Racism’s Persistent Presence

Note: I wrote this article just before the Charleston shootings but waited to post it until after it was due to be printed in my church’s bulletin this past Sunday. I considered revising it in the wake of the shootings but decided to print it as written. There have always been signs telling us that the...

Easter & Passover: A History of Bigotry

Sometimes when I start to write something it takes a life of its own and sends me in directions I didn’t intend to go. This is one such blog. It started out as an article for Easter morning, but my research led me to some things that fundamentally altered where I was being taken—dark things that needed to...

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