Month: June 2008

Theologian Miroslav Volf said: To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life. At our parish Sunday, we had one […]

A Methodist is a Baptist who can read. A Presbyterian is a Methodist with money. An Episcopalian is a Presbyterian with manners. While there are many problems with my own church in the US (The Episcopal Church), the reason it has been unable to be indigenous like other Anglican bodies around the world, is primarily […]

  So the true difficulty is making time and space amidst ‘household’ responsibility.  If you look at the Apostolic Tradition of Hippolytus (250 A.D), you discover that the ‘hours of prayer’ made famous by the monastic tradition, actually began in the church among ‘ordinary’ Christians.  So, the early Christians rose at midnight and prayed, and […]

I heard that when Henri Nouwen used to teach workshops to seminarians on prayer, he would begin by gathering the class together (and of course they were in rapt attention), say a few words, then request that they sit in silence—for four hours! Nouwen would observe that the seminarians would squirm and fidget during the […]

I have gone back to Henri Nouwen’s book, The Way of the Heart, his reflection on how the sayings and stories of the Desert Fathers can inform ministry in our day (and any day). What struck me was his notion that silence is not usually what we think of. We think of silence as an […]

Muslim women dress so as not to be taken advantage of. Jewish (Hasidic and Orthodox) men ‘wear’ their faith so that all can see. Buddhists look like, Buddhists. Christians priests are obvious, but what makes the body as a whole distinct?  I know, no ritual or dress ‘saves’ us, but do the rituals of Western […]

As I wrote below, to find success in our culture is not to find one’s place in the group, but to transcend it. I was reading a recent Touchstone article (‘Unmarried, Still Children” by Joan Frawley Desmond) and the author quotes Jeffrey Arnett’s recent work Emerging Adulthood, where Arnett says that those in their late […]

A recent article in Prism (Ron Sider’s publication) by Wendy Bilgen shows a fascinating snapshot of life in Turkey. Bilgen and her husband, a Turkish native, recently returned to Turkey to live. She writes: One day our son’s new Turkish friend asked my husband, a Turkish native returning to his homeland to preach the gospel,”Why […]

There is a new breed of Christ-follower in America today. These are people who are more interested in being the Church than in going to church. They are more eager to produce fruit for the kingdom of God than to become comfortable in the Christian subculture. They are focused on the…spiritual passions that facilitate their […]