We live in suspicious times. I wore a mask during my most recent trip to the grocery store. As I was checking out, I noticed an unmasked woman glaring at me. No words were exchanged, and yet I got the distinct feeling that she was saying something like: “oh, so…
On March 27, the New York Times reported that although in some respects COVID-19 was uniting Americans in a common experience, it was also exposing fractures in our society: “A kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at…
This is what the LORD says: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” Jeremiah 6:16 Out beyond the stacked stone walls, beyond the moldboard plow perched upon it,…
I assure you that anyone who gives you a drink of water because you belong to me will certainly receive a reward. Mark 9:41 The facts of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, are well known. Most important, it was caused entirely by human error and prolonged by a subsequent…
First Reformed presents looks at current social issues through the lens of religion and specifically the eyes of a pastor from a failing Reformed church. To its credit, it attempts to give a well-rounded view of these issues. Pastor Ernst Toller (Ethan Hawke), is recently divorced and has lost his…
As a child of the 80s born to evangelical parents with a tall stack of Christian music on vinyl, I grew up with an odd mix of music. Music from an earlier era of secular styles was called “oldies.” Oldies were music that was once the devil’s music that had…
In late October, a gunman opened fire on a Jewish synagogue in Pittsburgh, killing 11 people in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in United States history. Earlier the same week, a white supremacist killed two black customers at a grocery store in Louisville. All of this came on the heels of…
“Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Luke 9:54 In the passage above, Jesus has just sent his disciples ahead of him to the towns and communities he plans to visit on his way to Jerusalem. Among the places his representatives…
Benedict Joseph Labre was an unemployed transient who begged around Europe for 13 years, eating refuse that other people didn’t want and clothing himself in rags. He was infested with vermin; he smelled bad. Yet fewer than a hundred years after his death in 1783, the Roman Catholic Church canonized…
The practice of baptizing infants has been sufficiently defended by many writers. (Bromiley’s Children of Promise: The Case for Baptizing Infants [1979] and Brownson’s The Promise of Baptism [2006] are both good examples.) So too, the supposed necessity of immersion has been well contested. What’s often overlooked is that our…
