A prayer for discernment Good friends of ours, Greg and Mary Jane Grooms recently introduced us to a poem, a prayer I have been…
Denis Haack
The Post (Steven Spielberg, 2018)
The free press in a democracy In 1971 the United States was at war in Viet Nam, and I was eligible for the draft.…
Challenges to Christian Ideas
Discernment / Pluralistic World
The facts are relatively simple. Many of our neighbors in our pluralistic world are non-Christians, and so have adopted world and life views that…
Faithfulness, Not Results
Maturity and Flourishing / Ordinary Life
“We are called to a selfless stewardship of all callings, cultures, and creation in a manner that is creative, life affirming, and God honoring,”…
Singularity (Jon Hopkins, 2018)
Music of None Spirituality Music accompanies life because life—and creation itself—generates music, and cannot stop. At the moment of creation, God told Job so…
Albrecht Dürer (Stacey Bieler, 2017)
A restless craving for perfection Artists, like all of us, are partly a product of their time. Whether our posture towards the world is…
On Reading Augustine’s Confessions
Books / Faith / Spirituality
The uneasy feeling I had in anticipation of reading the Confessions was no surprise. I had read it before. It had stunned me—the beauty…
No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria (Rania Abouzeid, 2018)
Humanizing a brutal conflict The basic chronology is well known. In December 2010, a desperate street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in…
Silence and Beauty (Makoto Fujimura)
Quiet Wonder It is possible to get through life by skimming over the surface of reality. Most things in the world of advanced modernity…
The Porter’s Gate Work Songs (2017)
We Labor Unto Glory Add up the hours spent on our job (whatever it is) and the myriad tasks (whatever they are) that must…