Distracted by our own devices
I’ve become the sort of person who checks her phone constantly. I did not have to go this way.
prayer
Coakley's kind of theology requires more than claims. It needs prayer.
In response to our request for essays on the subject road, we received many compelling reflections. Here is a selection.
And what would happen if we didn't?
Dying faithfully
Whether we're dying or living with grief, there are faithful ways to do so. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre points us in the right direction.
We seem to always want something—anything—to happen. This has implications for the life of prayer.
Azra Akšamija and Jo Murphy make art that points to things made invisible by fear—both our own fear and our society's.
I love a good mountaintop experience. It’s a moment when everything changes. Insight flares up in the mind, illuminating the moment, the experience, the problem in a whole new way. You’re never quite the same again. One such moment for me happened in prayer when I was on a three-day silent retreat.
Praying strings
I gobble books by musicians. Bruce Cockburn's memoir has more virtues than most.
I don't have much use for the notion that hostility toward religion generally or Christianity in particular pervades American media. Yes, Bill Maher can be kind of horrible, but there's really just the one of him on TV. What is common (if still hardly pervasive) among left-leaning commentators is an attitude toward religion that includes little hatred or vitriol but plenty of puzzlement, ignorance, and mild condescension. Here's an odd example by science writer Brian Palmer, on medical missionaries in Africa:
Growing in prayer is not simply acquiring a set of special spiritual skills. It is growing into Christian humanity.
God’s longing
Micha Boyett writes tenderly about her Southern Baptist background, even as she grafts herself into a more liturgical expression of the faith.
My student hasn’t allegorized Jane Eyre as Origen did the Bible. But she wrestles with passages until the text gives her a blessing.
“When I started out I was focused on whether God was or was not out there. Now I am much more comfortable with ambiguity.”