Tone Matters
When I told a dear female friend of mine that I was writing a reflection on Luke 10:38,* she rolled her eyes. “You mean where he scolds Martha for doing housework?” she asked with a sigh. “C’mon, Jesus. Really?” I’d been turning the Luke passage over in my mind for a week now, looking up […]
Names and Stories
When I lived in Israel in the early 1970s, I visited a lake in the northern part of the country that Israelis call Kinneret. It is called that, I was told, because its roughly triangular shape resembles a kinnor, a certain kind of hand-held harp mentioned many times in scripture. Some linguists say this is […]
A Deep Longing – June 8, 2021
“American culture has almost entirely fragmented the extended family. As a result, we experience a deep longing for the things the extended family used to provide… The church as a family can be a way of incarnating an answer to these longings.” -Hal Miller, from “Brothers, Sisters” in Called to Community: The Life Jesus Wants […]
Relationship to the World – May 21, 2021
“To wander far from the familiar “home” of his adolescent ways of belonging, doing, and being. He must, as poet Mary Oliver puts it, “stride deeper and deeper into the world.” His culture will greatly influence the manner in which he wanders, as will his gender, physical constitution, psychological temperament, age, and bio-region. In one […]
