The theologian and the musician in Bonhoeffer continuously interacted – not only in the sense that his theology informed his musical judgments, but also that his musical knowledge and sensibilities helped him to think through and express some of his most significant theological ideas.
Delight sneaks up on us in the middle of all that is intolerable, breaking in through despair.
As Sophie and I were painting and chatting she paused with paintbrush in hand and asked, “What does being a Christian mean to you”? It was such a basic question, yet it caught me off-guard.
To start the story with inherent goodness (that has been forgotten) would mean that the story is not about making our badness good, but about remembering who we are.
These breakthroughs in reconciliation happen because Muslims and Christians have taken the time to walk together and accompany each other along the road of reconciliation to a new place.
Where is the Lord, the God of Elijah? – Elisha, 2 Kings 2 I’ve been thinking lately about the link between memory and sound—the aural shape of memory—and how certain sounds can send you falling headlong into different corners of your memory. There are simple ones like when you hear…
On his first day in office, President Biden sat at the Resolute Desk and signed a flurry of executive orders, many of them intentionally reversing his predecessor’s most contentious policies. With the swift stroke of the pen, permits to construct the Keystone XL pipeline were revoked and the U.S. was…
Today, almost unmistakably, people in my tradition—people who have an ancestral distrust of government—find themselves susceptible to populist lines of argument. “They want to take away your freedoms” is a lightning rod in my community. It’s also a go-to populist line: “The elites are coming and they are going to enforce their will upon you.”
We expect a warm assurance that we can have it all—that our dependencies on nature are benignly “managed” somewhere else. Wealthy Christians put a pious spin on this assumption under the guise of “caring for Creation.”
Each of us has our own pandemic story that intersects somehow with our culture’s larger story; our own micro-stories written on the margins of a macro-story. My 2020 story felt like de ja vu, because I was diagnosed with cancer one year before the pandemic.
