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What’s a miracle? How can we (frail human creatures that we are!) separate contingency—what’s possible but unpredictable, an event that seems unlikely or unintended—from miracle?

Why and how I bless my children

American civil religion is dead, to paraphrase Nietzsche. We have killed it.

A week ago I led a memorial service, a celebration of life, for a two-day old. It was excruciating, as you might imagine. It was also stunning and beautiful, as you might not imagine. Pain was real and evident, but more present was the love that surrounded these two parents and these three grandparents. That service came on the tail of four other deaths in our congregation, all women in their nineties. 

Far from being meaningless slights with minimal harm, microagressions intrude on the spiritual lives of those who are already marginalized and oppressed.

As a child, I followed the order of worship in the bulletin, mentally checking off each item. My eyes were on the prize.

If anyone can wax poetic about the power of a clean slate, it's Paul. In his mystical meanderings on the human body's relationship to the body of Christ, he doesn't ground his hope in the things that humans do (or don't do) in response to tradition, social pressure, or threats. He grounds it in the inclusive finality of Jesus Christ himself.

“What’s happening to America?” I’ve overheard such comments, exasperated and worried, frequently of late. Baton Rouge, Minnesota, Dallas, Nice, Baton Rouge again: “Has the world lost its mind?”

Even in the jagged edges of life, God’s glory shines. And we are the cultivators of this glory.

The cross is anything but a success story. Failure and disappointment are at the heart of Christianity.

Pharaoh trembled at the growing Hebrew population; at the thought that these slaves might realize their oppression and realize their power. He demanded that the Egyptians throw all of the Hebrew baby boys into the Nile River. Herod trembled at the report from the eastern scholars of a child who had been born King of the Jews; at the prospect of Jewish rebellion and an end to his tenuous hold on power.

Nice, on France’s Mediterranean coast, now joins a long list of cities, on four continents, where Islamist terrorists have perpetrated gruesome attacks, mercilessly killing hundreds of innocents. And those are just where some of the highest-profile outrages have occurred, the ones that attract headlines.

Much of what Christianity has long been saying about the cross of Christ is problematic. So what is to be done about it?

By summer, the plants are working overtime. It's a wonder we don't have as many words for green as the Inuit have for snow.

Bathroom bills. The phrase’s bouncy, alliterative nature, plus just the word bathroom, makes it somehow seem light, frivolous . . .  oh, it’s just about the bathroom. It’s not.

Writing used to be easy. Now, nothing seems easy. Leaning in, I just stare at the screen. Occasionally, I try to type something. Despite my desperation to write, my mind is held captive to a former place. Bloody films never leave you.