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Double vision: Luke 1:39-55
The glad song Mary sings to her cousin Elizabeth in Luke’s Gospel functions like a lighted magnifying glass. It illumines, making possible the discernment of something that was there all the time, but difficult to see without aid. Mary sings of the whole new order of things that God is creating all around us, one in which the hungry are filled with good things and the rich, who have unwisely filled up on so much that does not satisfy, are emptied so that they can have their real hungers met at last.
One more candle
Advent in Lebanon
Toward home: Zephaniah 3:14-20
Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, “The human spirit is incapable of ridding itself of an abiding sense of homelessness.” It is as if we never feel quite at home anywhere but are always seeking that sweet place. We yearn for the day when the distance between time and eternity will be finally and fully bridged; until then, we understand exile.
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This lucid little book began as the William Belden Noble Lectures, which deal with Christian faith and contemporary issues....
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David Maraniss, author of When Pride Still Mattered, a biography of Vince Lombardi, delivers another biography of a...
Light from Heaven
You think your church has problems? Imagine your church building closing and your denomination telling you that it can’t afford to fund a pastor....
Letter to a Christian Nation
There is something charmingly quaint about Sam Harris’s new book, Letter to a Christian Nation....
Hours of Babel
The acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu strings together four stories from around the globe in Babel....
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One can’t quibble with the breadth and eclecticism of this volume, which anthologizes poets as different as Anne Brad...
Change agent (Luke 3:1-6; Philippians 1:3-11)
Paul’s letter to the Philippians puts me in mind of the annual ritual of Christmas letters and how much I enjoy receiving them, though I have to admit that sometimes the correspondence can veer off into the stratosphere of braggadocio. You know the type.
Light the candles (Jeremiah 33:14-16)
How odd that the most hopeful season of the Christian calendar begins in the midst of darkness! When we light the first candle on the Advent wreath, it will not be a second too soon. This Advent I feel an urgent need for the light that comes from God, and I do not think I am the only one.
Owls: A poem
Before the solstice in December whentrees stand stripped on granite ground,I hear them in the woods at dusk,their hollow hooting back and forth,...
Deepening darkness: Anticipating the light
It’s my favorite time of year—though I never heard the word Advent until my mother brought home an Advent calendar one year....