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Remedial instruction: Amos 8:1-12
When a child is ignoring basic responsibilities, parents rely on a well-known parenting technique to make a point. Mom looks her ten-year-old in the eye while holding a toothpaste tube in one hand and the cap in the other. “This is called toothpaste,” she says, “and this is called a cap. They go together.” The Lord God is not beyond impatience and remedial instruction when people need a reminder about neglected responsibilities. God held a basket of ripened summer fruit beneath Amos’s nose and said, “Amos, what do you see here?” The prophet, sensing that God was serious, didn’t bother joking. “A basket of summer fruit,” he replied. With that brief exchange, strangely similar to a parent remedially instructing a child, the doors opened to a flood of divine wrath.
Teach us to pray: Luke 11:1-13
In one of the most famous sermons ever delivered, John Donne described the challenge of retaining concentration during prayer. The year was 1626....
"That would be like if Christians went places and built churches"
I always enjoy watching Jon Stewart go after Fox News. Sure, it’s like
shooting fish in a barrel, but when the shooter’s hilarious and the...
Living in a material world
God doesn’t hate stuff. God invents stuff.
America's Economic Moralists: A History of Rival Ethics and Economics
Americans have viewed morality in economic life in at least two ways....
The Future of Islam/The Crisis of Islamic Civilization
"Osama bin Laden hijacked four airplanes and a religion.” So reads a full-page ad that appeared in the New York Times...
The Practice of Adaptive Leadership: Tools and Tactics for Changing Your Organization and the World
As Faith Covenant Church approaches its centennial, it is long on history and ...
Exporting mental illness
An impoverished doctor in an Alpine valley of hearty people, lures a naive country boy into his examining room, shows him frightening anatomical charts of the mysteries within, and ...
Balance and privilege
You can tell a lot about people by what they hang on their walls. If it’s someone with an office, it gets even more interesting....
The traditional passion play, now with less antisemitism
This summer, a small Bavarian town’s life is consumed by community theater. It’s time again for the Oberammergau Passion Play, produced once a decade since the 17th century....
Wedding season
We are in the thick of it: Friday evenings have been
given over to wedding rehearsals and to discreetly bowing out of the...
July is Messy Month
The last few weeks have seen good conversation here about children, worship and Sunday school....
Mercy amid evil
Deuteronomy speaks of restoration, of the people’s return to God and to the land....
From Christian militias to Christian drug gangs
I have mixed feelings about media-criticism blog GetReligion....
Back to Sunday school?
A friend of mine was dismayed when
Sunday school teachers at her church proposed a new Sunday school
schedule for fall: classes held weekly except for the third Sunday of...
Price of oil: Misdirected anger
President Obama on June 3 reportedly expressed “upper-level outrage” at the situation in the Gulf of Mexico, where a runaway British Petroleum oil well has spilled millions of gallons of oil....
Century Marks
As Arizona goes? While Arizona’s new immigration law may be controversial, demographically the state may be a precursor of things to come in the U.S. It has both a large Hispanic population (30 percent) and a significant generation gap: of those over 65 years of age, 83 percent are white; of those under 18, only 43 percent are white. An estimated 400,000 undocumented residents live in Arizona (Christian Science Monitor, May 24).