Peter W. Marty

After sharing laudatory remarks about Nai-Wang Kwok, the YDS dean invited him to respond. I have thought a lot about the three sentences Kwok said before he sat down again.

A tall stack of books on the floor of my bedroom greets me each morning. Its very presence is exhausting.

The traveler eats whatever food is placed before her; she aims to learn as much of the language as possible. A tourist sacrifices less.

I keep a 36-inch utility shovel in my church office. I use it to dig the graves that hold the cremains of our congregation's saints.

A poor person looking up at my residence could mistake it for one of the barns belonging to the rich man Jesus talked about—the one who didn't know his soul was buried beneath all that corn and sorghum.

Moral concern usually begins when one person makes an effort to become, in some measure, one with the other. Privilege impedes this.

Like Adam, we may end up treating God as if God were at the periphery. But where there is no center—or where we become the center—the circumference of life disappears.

I knew life was a gift to be shared, not a possession to safeguard, even before my wife collapsed on the kitchen floor. But it was abstract knowledge then.

Some churches have well-developed processes of assessment, support, and goal setting. Others have no review mechanism whatsoever.

Read the main article on the importance of pastoral evaluations.

...

I once preached a Christmas sermon that struck out with one family. I had underestimated the peril of tampering with holiday sentiment.

A common tendency among believers is to think of Jesus Christ in the past tense. He's the guy we study in the Bible that some taxidermist must have mounted on a wall.

A pastor 30 years older than I was interviewing me for my first parish assignment. His final question unsettled me.

Rob Bell fights every impulse in our culture to domesticate Jesus, reminding readers that Christians do not believe in Christianity; they believe in the Christ who wants to "draw all people" to himself.

Sometimes we speak of "possessing" memories. That's not quite right. A precious memory held in a lockbox doesn't release life, at least not the fullness of life of which it is capable.

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.