Week 10 (Year 2, NL)

Human parents, even good ones, have limits. God does not.

Throughout scripture, human bodies are not an obstacle to righteousness; they are its location.

At the heart of each lesson is storytelling and wondering.

Our behavior doesn’t change the claim Jesus makes on us.

Is there any good news in Jesus' teaching on divorce?

Did Jesus mean that all the things we mean by accomplishment, and maturity, and reason, and progress, are actually small niggling things that we must finally shuck and lay aside, in order to again be like children, spiritually open and emotionally naked and constantly liable to giggling?

My Presbyterian granddaughter hasn’t heard about 500 years of conflict over “the real presence.” At her cousins' Catholic church, she washed down the wafer with a large gulp from the cup—and then another.

How are we to reconcile the Old Testament's violence with the gospel? Jerome Creach's book is among the best of a recent stream of books on the topic.

At first, Mandy was hesitant to come to the children's moment. Before long, some people thought she had become too comfortable in worship.

I once saw children's ministry as a steppingstone to something else. This attitude put me in league with the hindering kind of disciples.

Today’s Gospel lesson, though not a traditional baptismal text, embodies the spirit of the sacrament: the ones bringing the children to Jesus are not necessarily parents; they are “people” moved to care for these little ones. This choice of language leads us to ask, if the adults bringing the children to Jesus are not their parents, then who are they? Why do these men and women stand up to the disciples for the sake of children that are not biologically theirs?

How to approach Jesus' strict teaching about divorce and remarriage as it appears in Mark's Gospel, without the somewhat more lenient amendments of Matthew and Paul?

Marriage does not exist only for companionship or procreation or complementarity. It has a cruciform shape, like other ascetical practices, and is a transformative experience for the two individuals. In marriage, God intends not only to alleviate human loneliness but to effect human salvation.