The Wittenberg Door

The Keeper, The Tiller, The Question

A Cain and Abel Story for Modern Man

A Flat Surface Upon Which to Eat

It’s a new year, and many of us are thinking about self-improvement. This is a wonderful thing to do. We all need a bit of a tune-up now and then. But as we make our resolutions and focus on ourselves, it’s worth considering the parable of my table.

Confession

“I don’t roll on nobody,” I said, abysmal grammar and all, but a jail cell is no place for linguistic niceties. My voice was...

First Hack: A Techno Myth

Unaware, we can stand in a museum, in a temple of modernity that extracts life from all other temples. We can gaze into the vengeful gift of a god while that god stands right behind us, unseen, not believed in, multiplying his box of miseries into every pocket in the museum and beyond.

Ruddy Glory: The Resonance of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Was May demonstrating, knowingly or not, that even the isolated and disparaged—on the very nose of their ridicule—could be pointing the way brightly ahead through a dark and foggy future? Assuming that he was well aware of the increasing indignities and sufferings endured by his much-maligned people in the wider world, I can only think so.

Feast of the Solstice of God Among Us: On Healing the...

On this year’s Feast of the Nativity of the Light in Our World in the Age of the Machine, my prayer is this: may our ceremonies not be one dimensional, but simple and complex constellations of God who dwells among us in so many ways, within layer upon layer of reality, not comprehensible but fully experienceable, beyond our categories of thought but within the bodies of Creation.

Nostalgia, Longing, and Christmas Joy “In the Bleak Midwinter”

Christina Rossetti's 1872 devotional poem, "A Christmas Carol," has held a special place in my heart from the moment I first...

Advent in Oklahoma

Like the people I grew up among, Puddleglum speaks hope sideways, hope being too sacred to speak outright. But he speaks it anyway, sideways and hedged but there, the way generations of my family might speak of maybe a better crop or a new well next year.

Narnia Against the Machine: Deep Magic for the Modern Age

Witnessing the ascendancy of the Machine, Lewis understood what was at stake. He watched this ideology sweep across his society and take hold in its schools, and he keenly felt the loss of what was so hastily displaced and soon forgotten. The medieval worldview that Lewis cherished was replaced by an ideology that breeds nihilism and despair.

Against the Ministry-Industrial Complex, For the Local Membership

Criticizing the ministry-industrial complex does not mean professional resources have no place in ministry. It is not so much their use as their guiding role in congregational life that prevents churches from prioritizing deeper formation. Information and inspiration are good, but congregations must recognize their insufficiency to foster deep and sustained transformation—and must not confuse tools meant to inform and inspire with formation itself.