First Sunday of Advent (Year 4, NL)

I wish Durham’s HEART program had existed when my friend Joe was killed.

It’s not that Babylon was backward. But it wasn’t home.

The Spirit-driven tendency to undermine barriers goes all the way back to Peter and Paul.

Martin Luther went looking for God—and found Christ on the cross.

An incident in Germany reminded me who we all belong to.

Poor Philip just needs a little more from God. I know how he feels.

What does it look like to embody the peace of the city of God?

How can we overcome our anxiety? And should we even try?

“According to Islam, Jesus always speaks the truth. The question is how we understand it.”

John 14:15–21

It’s common to confuse ministry leaders with Jesus. We can see ourselves in Judas’s question to Jesus, “How is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” Why do we have to carry the message?

How would I get to nursing homes, or respond to emergencies? What would I do when it snowed? I hoped the answers would come as I pedaled.

The Old Testament displays an ongoing conversation between conflicting views of God's character. In light of this, Jesus' story becomes very important.

For my money, John’s is the only Gospel in which Jesus seems really lonely.

Jesus’ promise that he and God will come make a home with us sounds like good news to me.

Our so-called secular age purports to have disenchanted us of our pre-modern superstitions. Many of us find God’s stark absence from our daily affairs to be our most prominent experience of the divine.