Wide-eyed Faith

To have faith is to have your eyes open. It is to be awake and alive to the world. To have faith is to embrace and live thoroughly in the world God made and has given to us, the world God loves so much, the world God’s own Son loved and for which he died. […]

Beach Reading

From the Christian Century, September 2003 A stretch of two weeks at the beach allows me to do something I’ve never able to manage during the working year: read more than one book at a time—maybe six or seven—and experience the literary and intellectual synergy that results. This year I found myself reading, more or […]

Patriot’s Dream

I love the Fourth of July—everything about it: picnics, parades, baseball, fireworks on the lakefront carefully synchronized with the 1812 Overture, about which Peter Gomes quipped that it is peculiar that we would chose to celebrate our independence listening to an overture written to celebrate the victory of the Russians over the French, our allies who, […]

Thoughts and a Prayer for Father’s Day

Psalm 128 Your wife will be like a fruitful vine Within your house; Your children will be like olive shoots around your table…… May you see your children’s children.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I’m thinking about my father. He died too soon, when he was 59, of emphysema, from smoking several packs of Camels a day all his life […]

The Importance of our Unity

So wouldn’t it be something if instead of internal conflict, the churches showed the world what respect and tolerance and compassion looked like? Wouldn’t it be something if instead of launching rhetorical broadsides against ideological foes, we found a way to show the world what the love of Christ looks like? John M. Buchanan June […]

The Divine Question, the Human Question

Who are you? You are one for whom Jesus Christ lived and died. You are God’s child, worth the love of God which lived in the life of Jesus. You are given dignity and dominion by your creator and you have the responsibility of co-creating with God the world around you. John M. Buchanan May […]

Remember

In this season of Easter, we continue to be reminded that ordinary moments become sacred moments, that memory clarifies and seals experiences of grace, and that God lives. God lives not in a remote corner of the universe, not on a throne invisible above the clouds, not even in creeds, philosophies, theologies or sermons, but […]

Keeping Alive the Rumor

It is not possible to prove the existence of God. But, come to think of it, existence itself is not ultimately a very interesting phenomenon. The existence of that person sitting next to you is not nearly as interesting as who he or she is; your beloved perhaps, a friend, a neighbor, an acquaintance, a […]

Let us Walk through the Door

But the word today is that death is not what it seemed to be. Because of Easter, death is no longer in charge. Because of Easter death no longer has the last word. God does. Because of Easter we literally live in a new world where the ultimate reality is not the death of all […]

Adamant Young Man

That is why he comes. It is the very essence of Christianity that God is to be found in this story and every human story, including and particularly stories of suffering. To the age-old question, “Where is God in the midst of earthquake, flood, holocaust, plane crash, terrorist attack; the malignancy, the stroke; at the […]