1. Advent means “appearing”: it is a season focused on the hope of His appearing.
Read moreDon't lay a hand on the son
When Abraham lays Isaac on the altar, he hears a voice crying-out from heaven “Do not lay your hand upon the boy-child” (Gen 22:12). Abraham, in some sense, wasn’t planning to “lay his hand on the child” though, right? Wasn’t he going to sacrifice him? Why doesn’t the voice say “Don’t sacrifice the boy-child” instead? Certainly, that would have been more accurate.
Read moreThe hour that the rooster cries
“Rooster-cry” names that hour when, for anyone who’s been on a farm or who lives in Liliha (where feral roosters prowl the streets), the rooster heralds not so much the breaking of day, but the aching of the night. The rooster crows, as Agamben suggests, as an inquiry in the darkness, asking when the light will return: “His – if you listen carefully – is the heartbroken cry of those who watch in the night and until the last do not know if the day will come.”
Read moreAllhallows and the Feast of Booths
If Easter celebrates God’s deliverance over Sin and Death, the greater House of Bondage, Allhallows celebrates the implications this has for us as the people who follow in the wake of his victory.
Read moreThe theology of the "The Office" at a local high school
In a talk I gave on “The Office” earlier this week I suggested that this convicting and humorous force of awkwardness works in the show like the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit was sent into the world, after all, to bring “conviction concerning sin, righteousness, and judgement” (Jn. 16:8). A chief part of what occurs in those uncomfortable awkward silences is a convicting work.
Read moreLove covers the body from profanation
Leaving behind us for a moment all of the wearied and wheel-rutted arguments for and against “modesty” and all of the recent condemnations of “purity culture” I want to consider, if only in passing on this Monday morning, the nature of “the veil” —by which I mean here anything drawn across the body in order to give it a glory and a covering.
Read moreLove suffers death
The singers of the Song of Solomon proclaim that “love is stronger than death” (Songs 8:6). It is precisely this quality that makes love what it is. Love is the things that is capable of laying-down its life for the beloved and then rising again.
Read moreAgainst positive vibes
There is something better than being positive, something better which being positive will in fact rob us of: being joyful.
Read moreOn being called by a name, part 3
And this is not just true of people in the scriptures, it’s true of all people (as a matter of fact, its true of all people because the Bible tells us true things about real people). In Les Miserables the answer Jean Valjean receives to his famous song “Who am I?” is in fact the named history of his life; the name transcribed upon him over time: 24601.
Read moreOn being called by a name, part 2
“What is naming?” Walker Percy asks. “Is it an event which we can study as we study other events in natural history, such as solar eclipses, glandular secretions, nuclear fusion, stimulus-response sequences?”
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