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Jusepe Ribera’s Saint Bartholomew Holding a Knife
In preaching this week on the calling of St. Nathanael, I had to trim some thoughts out of my sermon. Here are what I found to be some interesting notes in the short passage of John 1:43-51 that didn’t make this Sunday’s cut.
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p/c: @kelli_mcclintock via unsplash
When the Ghost of Christmas-Yet-To-Come shows Scrooge the Cratchit mourning Cratchit household, Bob Cratchit —the Father— is absent. He is late returning from selecting a grave-plot for Tiny Tim who has passed away and lays in state until that coming Sunday when they will burry him. Bob is not late because of the errand, he is late because “he has walked a little slower than he used, these few last evenings…” (Christmas Carol, Stave 4) explains Peter, the eldest Cratchit boy.
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p/c Europana via Unsplash
…On this night we gather with memorial portions of our Christmas greens (Christmas Trees, wreaths, kadomatsu, boughs of holly falalalala-lala-lala, etc.) and make of them a bonfire. We pray the evening service, share a feast, sing psalms and spiritual songs, and make merry (Eph. 5:19). It is the twelfth and last day of Christmas on which we celebrate all the gifts our True Love has given to us (Rom. 12:6-8)…
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p/c: Luigi Boccardo via Unsplash
We’ve been preaching through the ‘5 Senses’ at St. Benedict Hall with Wednesday’s eucharist homily culminating in a biblical theology of one of the senses and the way in which it leads us to Jesus. Our bodies were made for the Lord, “and the Lord for the body” (1 Cor. 6:13).
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p/c: Shalone Cason via usplash… https://unsplash.com/@shalone86
A commentary on the 2019 Book of Common Prayer’s service for the “Reconciliation of Penitents”.
First, you enter. You have been waited upon. You are welcome in this space, have a seat.
Idly do people talk about “leaving the world at the door.” That is not true here. Bring the world with you —your cares, problems, stresses, sins, failures, collapsing dreams, the smell of where you just were, the thoughts which occupied you from your car to this little room, the screaming of children (yours or someone else’s), and the million things you need to do when you leave here —all of that bring with you. Leave none of it out.
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I recently saw the new commercial for Google Pixel 8 which highlights the device’s AI-enhanced “best-take” application feature. You can watch it here […] My first response was to laugh, modestly but not quite quietly. There is an Office episode (season 2, episode 21) in which Michael Scott does the same thing with photoshop. The result (which is the featured image above) is less than impressive.
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p/c: kieran white
A personal history.
Movement 1.
I did not grow-up with Advent as a season of waiting. Like many people in contemporary society I grew up with a strange season that came to span all the days from Thanksgiving to the Day-after-Christmas as a kind of elongated Holiday season… “elongated” is maybe too generous… “distended to the point of rupture” is probably a better description. Sometimes it started as early as the Day-after-Halloween.
Dracula is not merely a vampire tale; it is the vampire tale. The ‘vampire’ as a cultural icon find its genesis in Stoker’s novel. Indeed almost the entire horror genre (whether film or books) can be traced to Stoker’s Dracula and Shelley’s Frankenstein. Though neither Stoker nor Shelley were Christians, their works are crucially important for our study: they tell us what modernity is; they tell us about ourselves. What does this mean?
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On p.40 of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Mario keeps his older brother from sleep attempting to circle the conversation towards his real goal: the question of “do you believe in God?”
Hal complains, “You ask me this once a week.”
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p/c : Nicola Fioravanti
There is a series of days which exists in the Church’s calendar which has all but disappeared from the Christian calendars of contemporary American Christianity save for one lingering event: trick-or-treating on Halloween.
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