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Yesterday I offered “ashes to go” at the White Plains train station. It’s apparently controversial, but I’m letting others do the heavy theological lifting. I wanted to experience it before I reflected. It was cold. Below freezing. We still haven’t gotten out of the polar vortex, which I think has decided that it’s very comfortable in its new digs and it will never leave. Besides, spring has gone fishing. Ice fishing.

Stanley Hauerwas’s book is about learning how to die and training how to be human. Broadly speaking, it is a book about time and purpose—or, better said, the purpose of time.

In local churches, brewing clubs have formed for fun and fellowship. They’re also extending a deep tradition of hospitality to non-Christians.

Son of God is a dud. Just don’t tell that to the film’s producers, Roma Downey and Mark Burnett. They found evidence of divine favor in the “truly miraculous” support they received from Catholic and evangelical leaders. It brought in $26.5 million its first weekend. Burnett and Downey’s marketing approach makes good business sense and has plenty of precedent.

With the imposition of ashes imminent—this stark ritual signalling the onset of a season starker still in its confrontations with mortality and its fleshly (and fleshy) deprivations—I am reading about food. Glorious food.

Vivaldi wrote his Magnificat for a choir of female orphans to sing for their supper. They were truly singing Mary's song.

If temptation were all about blatant wrongdoing, it would be far easier to avoid.

The Transfiguration has a hundred sermons in it. But to me the most touching element is the subplot.

"The church is not a building," says the song. Yet most churches have walls, a basement, and decades of accumulated accoutrements.

This is why we came—not to be reminded of our finitude. God knows we feel it in our bones, and some of us in our backs and legs and arthritic hands. We come kneeling and hoping that something or someone will whisper forgiveness so that we might start again. Believing or at least hoping that these 40 days that lead to the cross might just touch something deep in our hearts.  The priest comes and dabs his finger into the ashes.

I grew up in the midst of the Prosperity Gospel movement, and it’s left its mark, I’m afraid. I believed that God would bless (meaning financially bless) those who served the Almighty. It wasn’t only service, but God’s favor also came with financial reward.

Llewyn Davis lives a decidedly nonromantic existence as a starving artist. He’s a good musician, but there are thousands like him, and they can’t all succeed.

Washington is finally talking about increasing the minimum wage. Such a move comes with costs, but the benefits are far greater.

I have lived in the U.S. for nearly three years now, and there is so much to love: the beauty and the grandeur of the landscape, the welcome and hospitality I’ve found in one city after another, and so many new friends. But there is one thing I don’t love so much.

The Good Lord Bird is a tale of the antebellum South like none you’ve heard. A young slave is liberated by John Brown, who will later try to ignite a revolution.