The economy, inflation, spending money that isn’t there—got you worried? Surviving your retirement? Healthcare, sickness—concerned about these? Conflict and horrendous crimes, at home and abroad, terror attacks, urban chaos, drug…
Which of them would be the greatest. I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe at your high school graduation, there wasn’t any category, Most Likely to Succeed, but everybody…
Jews would not keep herds of pigs. The territory into which Jesus takes his disciples now is Gentile territory; more, it’s culturally Greek. Greek thought owed nothing to and had…
Why did the disciples cross the lake? To get to the other side. Only, as it turns out, that wasn’t so simple as they had thought when they set out. …
Here it is, two weeks later, and we’re still talking about Easter, bright with joy. Christ is alive! The tomb stands empty to the sky. It’s good to talk about…
I suppose, after the Christmas story, what we just heard is some of the most familiar Scripture. Writing under arrest in Rome, Paul tells the faithful in Philippi that “[i]t…
Around seventy years ago, a psychiatrist named Murray Bowen began to articulate a theory of how emotions operate in family systems. Bowen noted, as our own experience shows, that when…
Those who have spent a long time studying Mark bracket verses 9-20. The scholarly consensus is that Mark’s own original account ends with verse 8. At some later time—not necessarily…
The lectionary that several denominations use—the order of Scripture readings for the year—is organized in such a way that, around this time of year each year, we hear Jesus speaking…
“[W]hen the sabbath was over” (16:1), the women bought what they needed to finish the unfinished burial rites. They couldn’t finish! The law made them unable to finish. The traditional…