Uncategorized

EYES THAT SEE They gather downtown each week in the small living room of an upstairs apartment. It started out as one friend opening her home to a few others for a meal and the opportunity to engage a text through conversation. Word spread quickly to others that something significant was happening among those who were gathering. The small group of seven soon turned into a gathering of more than thirty. Couches meant for three or four people now hold…

My wife, Karin, handed our young son to a nurse who would take him to an operating room for open-heart surgery. As I watched, I felt kinship with Abraham taking Isaac up Mount Moriah, with hope that they would return down the mountain together. We took Tyler up Mount Moriah to open-heart surgery three times—at six days, four months, and eighteen months—and all three times we returned home with him. Tyler was diagnosed in utero with a heart defect that…

If you want to know more about the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor, theologian, and Nazi resister, you are in luck. Your choices range from Eberhard Bethge's classic biography, newly revised by Victoria Barnett and weighing in at 1,048 pages (Fortress, 2000), to half a dozen biographies of two hundred pages or less, in addition to three documentaries, three plays, two "biographical novels," an opera, and a feature film (Bonhoeffer: Agent of Grace, 1999). As Stephen R. Haynes…

The Galilean Sea. The Adriatic Sea. Violent storms on both. Mark's Gospel tells the story of Jesus and his disciples crossing the Sea of Galilee (Mark 4:35–41). A tired Jesus is fast asleep on a cushion in the stern of the boat when a sudden storm erupts. The book of Acts tells of Paul on the Adriatic Sea, as he travels from Jerusalem to Rome. After the crew and passengers have endured some fourteen days of howling winds and high…

I love the way the kingbird feeds by acrobatics from the trees along the lake. She lunges from her branch above the water to snatch what I can't see, or plunges down and curls around the bug she catches. I love the way that Levi takes communion at the rail. I kneel as he stands next to me, stocky, ruddy, ancient, undistracted, with his hands cupped out and his eyes half closed. When I'm at the cottage by myself, I…

In February 2009, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote one of his many much-talkedabout Op-Ed pieces, this one about the furor being raised over the government bailout of big banks in the wake of the economic crisis—a crisis that they, of course, more or less created. Brooks's point in that piece was essentially that outraged critics of government intervention should get real: government is not, as he put it, "in the Last Judgment business." It is not government's business…