With the college basketball season officially over, I was thinking back to a renewed rivalry this past season that in the end didn’t get much traction: the MU/KU game last fall. That rivalry is in some ways like many others: North Carolina/Duke or Louisville/Kentucky.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about mortality, how everything dies. Frankly, I don’t care for it, even if it is part of the liturgy on Ash Wednesday: “From dust you came and to dust you shall return.” If I’m being completely honest, I despise mortality!
Here’s a fun question: What’s the difference between a Chiefs game and a worship service in church? The list would be long, no doubt. But according to author Barbara Ehrenreich, the two have more in common than we might imagine, or they once did.
Did you see the press release from BBC News about the 2025 “word of the year” according to the Cambridge Dictionary? The word is parasocial, defined as a “relationship felt by someone between themselves and a famous person they do not know.”
Did you see the press release from BBC News about the 2025 “word of the year” according to the Cambridge Dictionary? The word is parasocial, defined as a “relationship felt by someone between themselves and a famous person they do not know.”
The theologian Paul Tillich once quipped that the whole earth is God’s monastery. In other words, even at the movies a person can have a religious experience.
Weekly staff meetings here at the church always begin with a time called Enrichment. Everyone takes turns leading, so each time we are enriched in different ways. It could be a selection of music by one person, a PowerPoint on some aspect of church life by another, and so on.
Seminary, like medical school and law school, equips students with a new vocabulary, most of the terms from Latin or Greek—hysterectomy, myocardia, amicus, modus operandi.
Many of you already know that we began a brief sermon series last Sunday, one we’re calling “Three Sermons, One Text.” For three weeks in a row, the scripture passage comes from Luke 10:25-37, the well-known parable about a man jumped by thieves while traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho.
There’s an old riddle about the math of Lent, which you may recall measures forty days in length, corresponding to Jesus’ forty days of testing in the wilderness.
In his spiritual memoir, British journalist Philip Toynbee wrote, “The basic command of religion is not ‘do this!’ or ‘do not do that!’ but simply look!” That may seem overly simplistic when one considers all the things the Bible commands us to do, but I think he makes a good point.
When I was still teaching at the seminary, I wrote an article about preaching in which I compared the creative process to making a movie. Lots of scholars have borrowed various metaphors over the years to get at what putting a sermon together is like.
One way to describe a sermon is as “a small piece of the Church’s ongoing conversation.” There are obviously two sides to that equation: there is what gets said prior to any given sermon that preachers account for (scholarly commentaries and everyday conversations), as well as the discourse that continues afterward, when the sermon is no longer the preacher’s but hopefully living on in the people who heard it.
In the smash-hit musical Hamilton, the song “The Room Where It Happens” describes a closed-door meeting that took place among Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Some of you are humming along even as you read this. It’s one of the many catchy tunes in the show. Last weekend, on the Read More...
In 1963, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. famously quipped, “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning.” According to religion scholars, more than sixty years later, the assertion remains true.
