12th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The challenges to unity are great. The reward of unity is tremendous.

Two new books trace the history of a rich religious image.

Sometimes I picture its author looking down at us and shaking his head.

In Yehiel Poupko’s poems, Jewish belief in God groans under the burden of divine silence.

I don’t want to hear any more from Eliphaz, Bildad, or Zophar. I want answers.

My daughter wants to know. Even as a biblical scholar, I don’t have a good answer.

It’s like Jesus knows. How?

Saul would have provided better odds against Goliath. But God might not have favored him in the matchup.

Theology as a love letter to God

The beloved song can contain God’s glory no more than the scripture it’s based on.

The wind and water operate at a guttural level within these fishermen disciples.

What do we miss when we seclude ourselves on safe shores of sameness?

When Jews, Christians, and Muslims gather to celebrate arts and culture, the dividing walls crumble.

God’s response to Job is cold comfort when you have terminal cancer.

I mostly agree with Jeffrey Weiss about prayer. I think St. Paul would too.

Alfred Lord Tennyson called Job "the greatest poem of ancient and modern times." Excerpts are regularly included in anthologies of world literature and religious poetry. It is an undeniable literary classic.

Why is it rarely preached in Christian churches? 

If God’s response to Job in chapter 38 were meant only to shut Job up, seven verses would be sufficient. But God is only getting started here, and the exuberance of the rhetoric insists that vastly more is at stake.

There is a puzzling and disturbing detail in Mark’s account of the storm at sea, one we often do not even notice. In verse 36, we are told that when Jesus heads across the sea with his disciples, “other boats were with him.”

Like the stories that come before it, the storm at sea is a parable of reversal.