Having long since given up on God and Christianity when I entered the program, I had no appreciation of its religious aspects. However, starting each class with a devotional and prayer became the building blocks upon which I started to form a renewed relationship with Christ.
The Lodi bus was the oldest bus in the Eastern Christian School Association fleet. We knew our lowly status just from riding that bus. The Association bought a new bus every year, but it never went to Lodi. The new buses went to Wyckoff and Midland Park. Even the Clifton kids had a newer bus than we did. But we lived among the heathen—not in one of the Dutch Calvinist colonies of New Jersey—and worse, among the low-class heathen. Lodi…
Worship is the place where we face our fears, the place where we empty ourselves and wait to see if what Jesus said is actually true: “If you seek your life, you’ll lose it, but if you lose it, you’ll find it; unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” Worship is the place where we wait for the fierce love of God to do its work in our hearts and carry us out into the world as agents of justice, peace, and the integrity of creation.
Angels were very real to ancient believers and very significant. As we shall see, they were the embodiments of the love of God, and they depicted how this love flowed from the heart of God and gave life to the world. The story of Jesus’ birth cannot be meaningfully told without them. But angels are not real to believers living in the 21st century.
Students who ask questions about why math is the way it is, rather than seeing math as a collection of known facts to be memorized, are told implicitly or explicitly that they are not “math people.” Many of them internalize this message, stop asking questions, and learn as little math as possible, avoiding careers that require the use of mathematics and sometimes passing erroneous (and harmful) messages about mathematics on to their children.
In Is Math Real? How Simple Questions Lead Us to Mathematics’ Deepest Truths, mathematician Eugenia Cheng argues that those labeled as “non-math people” because of the questions they ask are, in fact, more like research mathematicians than are those who accept concept after concept as “obvious.”
In all actuality, we don’t know for sure. We do know what the author of the Gospel According to Matthew wrote. And we know what the other synoptic authors Mark and Luke wrote, and we have the Gospel of John. We also know their sources and approximately when the gospels were recorded. We know that they recorded many of the same events in different words, chronology and for differing theological purposes. The gospel lesson from Matthew for the last Sunday…
Ultimately, sport opens windows to transcendence. One can hardly watch Usain Bolt run the 100 meters, or Simone Biles do a floor exercises, or Caitlin Clark sink a three-pointer, or witness Jim Redmond supporting his injured son Derek across the finish line without recognizing that God is at work in an extraordinary way.
Choosing birthday cards is always a daunting task–they’re either too smarmy, too sexual, too juvenile, too something. The picture is wrong, the sentiment not quite what one had hoped to say. Only rarely does one find that perfect card–and then, one is always tempted to buy seven of the same. In my formative years as a card shopper (not giving a card was a major transgression in my holiday-happy family), I had an additional problem: the length of the verse….
