God as parent is a radical metaphor
My youngest child turns 20 this month, which feels like a milestone. No more teenagers in the house! Everyone’s an adult (sort of)! We’ve officially launched our kids!
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Ambition used to be a vice
Now we tend to see it as a virtue—at least for some people.
The book of Job is a parody
Is the book of Job a tragedy or a comedy? The answer might seem obvious to you. It is perhaps obviously a tragedy: Job suffers both great loss and great physical pain. Lots of people die. Children die. Like almost all tragedies, the book is about suffering and its meaning or lack thereof.
Or maybe it seems obvious that it’s a comedy. The book has a classic comedic shape. Maybe it isn’t exactly funny, but it is placed inside a frame that is simple and even naive, with a happy ending just to be sure we understand that it is a comedy.
May 22, Easter 6C (John 5:1-9)
Abundance is not always God’s modus operandi.
May 15 Easter 5C Acts 11 1 18 John 13 31 35
The 2021 movie Belfast is set in Northern Ireland in 1969. Buddy, a nine-year-old Protestant boy, has a crush on a Catholic classmate. He asks his father if he could have a future with her, and his father replies, “That wee girl can be a practicing Hindu, or Southern Baptist, or vegetarian Antichrist. But if she’s kind, and fair, and you two respect each other, she and her people are welcome in our house.”
Giving women a voice at the seder table
Poet and liturgist Marcia Falk attempts to correct the gender bias of the traditional Passover Haggadah.
May 8 Easter 4C Acts 9 36 43 John 10 22 30
It was a Wednesday night, August 8, 2012. I was on call as a chaplain resident, taking a nap at my parents’ home, when my mother’s scream jarred me awake. I ran to my parents’ bedroom to see my mother holding my father, who had suddenly collapsed. She pleaded for me to call 911. Hours later, I sat in a room with her, my daughter, and an ER physician as he broke the news that my father had died, and life changed forever.
Tears are a gift from God
They put us in touch with essential things that we know to be dear or wrong.