I returned recently from teaching a course in London on the theological ontology of woman in relationship to the biblical divorce texts, with a special interest in the nature of abuse and of ecclesiastical responsibilities in difficult cases. To be sure, my own pastoral experience in the last decade has driven me to appreciate the urgency
Do you want to see reconciliation? Luke locates it in the seam of a double quaking. In Acts 16:25, Luke places us, his readers, in the darkness of the midnight hour, in the "inner" prison in Philippi, with Paul and Silas, fastened in the stocks. Their crime was the intolerable one of disturbing the peace
I must apologize to my readers for the long delay in finishing this series of essays. As you will see from the beginning, I began writing it in the spring, wrote most of it, and then numerous delays prevented its completion. I offer it now to you, again with the trees having become bare. Perhaps
It is a sobering thought, but the prevalence of porn may push us in one of two directions: women may decide porn can no longer be a relationship "deal breaker" and so "marry down" in order to marry at all, or we may see an increase in celibacy forced upon spiritually mature Christian women by
The morning sun met me today with the numbing news that the youngest daughter of longtime family friends had committed suicide after a long struggle with depression. I had never met the daughter, but her parents were a church, school, and neighborhood treasure in my younger years. There has been a lot of attention to depression
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.” Proverbs 18:21 If we believe James, the tongue is a veritable “world of iniquity” (3:6). This places us, from the start, several steps back from where we may be inclined to begin contemplating our habits of communication.
In his little On Art and Life, a selection from his landmark study, The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin, like Wendell Barry, reflects on humanity and labor in a way that ought to find beautiful translation in the Christian life, communal nurture, family and especially parental wisdom, and pastoral care: "And observe, you are put
Note: The following lines are the final words of an article titled "The Place of Law in the Gospel of Glory," just submitted for publication with the Confessional Presbyterian Journal as part of their "sic et non" series exploring debated issues within Reformed circles. With this article I bow out of the discussion indefinitely in order
"In the beginning, God..." Drawing near to the vast, unwieldy edifice which is the world of the Bible, we assume we enter here by way of the portico of the natural-supernatural distinction. We think we come here in order to find some happy harmony between them, perhaps discover too how the one may in some