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My mother holds a yellowed newspaper clipping in her hand as she answers the door. She stands wide-eyed looking at her grandson and says, "Are you Jesse?" "Yes, Grandma, I am." She lets us in, hugs us, and thrusts the newspaper clipping into my hand. It is an article from a 1969 edition of the Detroit Free Press about her father's retirement. "I thought you'd want to see this," she says. "It's been a long time since I've seen that…

When Jesus rose from the dead on Easter morning he rose as the beginning of the new world that Israel's God had always intended to make. That is the first and perhaps the most important thing to know about the meaning of Easter. Of course, I have said "when," not "if." I have argued in detail elsewhere that the only possible explanation for the rise of Christianity, and for it taking the shape it did, was that Jesus of Nazareth,…

I recently returned to Canada for a two-week sojourn to teach at the University of Toronto. This was a homecoming of sorts—to my "home and native land," to the familiar environs of the U of T, and to the vicinity of the Institute for Christian Studies where I did my master's degree. But as I was strolling around Queen's Park one evening, contemplating the iconic statues of various political saints that surround the Ontario Parliament, a disconcerting realization settled upon…

There's really nothing else like it, at least in a very long time, if ever. The audaciousness, even presumption, is already there quite plainly in the title. After all, Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life leaps and stretches, always gorgeously, to show and tell (with too much telling, according to some) the ungraspable, quite illogical prospect that this ever-so-mangled world was formed and persists in Love, no matter how dire or pervasive its woundedness. Think Hopkins the Jesuit: "The world…