One of the delights of moving to Manitoba was the discovery that pelicans are annual summer residents on the drainage pond behind our house. Pelicans have long been one of my favorite birds, even before I learned of their Christological significance some years back. Continue reading Pelicans!
“For if faith, as has been said above, is a sure persuasion of the truth of God – that it can neither lie to us, nor deceive us, nor become void – then those who have grasped this certainty assuredly expect the time to come when God will fulfill his promises, which they are persuaded cannot but be true. Accordingly, in brief, hope is nothing else than the expectation of those things which faith has believed to have been truly promised by God. Continue reading Calvin on Faith and Hope
“Modernity,” according to Root, “is the constant process of speeding things up.”1 Under the accelerating forces of modernity, human beings and communities are constantly scrambling to keep up with the rapid rate of change, leading to increasing levels of anxiety and depression. Root illuminatingly contrasts change with transformation: Continue reading Root on Transformation vs. Change
I had a wonderful week last week with the Doctor of Ministry cohort at Providence Theological Seminary teaching a course called, “Thinking and Interpreting Theologically.” The students read several insightful texts in preparation for our time together. The one that seemed to generate the most conversation was Andrew Root’s The Congregation in a Secular Age: Keeping Sacred Time against the Speed of Modern Life (Baker, 2021). It is the third volume in Root’s Ministry in a Secular Age trilogy. In the trilogy Root is dialoguing with the work of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in particular Taylor’s seminal A Secular Age. At the heart of Root’s project is the concern for developing ways for Christians to speak about and recognize the presence of divine action within the midst of a “social imaginary” that has reduced its vision to the “immanent frame.”1 Continue reading Performance of Identity
An arresting passage from Fritz Bauerschmidt’s sermon for the Baptism of the Lord entitled, “Hope for Everything,” found in his book How Beautiful the World Could Be: Christian Reflections on the Everyday. Continue reading Living within the Mystery of God
My Homiletics students are reading Stanley Hauerwas’s essay “Speaking Christian” for our next class on Wednesday. It contains the following prescient gem of a quote. Keep in mind the address was published over twelve years ago. Continue reading Speaking Christian