Kathleen Norris
Mercy, me (2 Peter 3:8-15a)
Mercy is not what we’re about, and I suspect we don’t want our God to be about it, either.
Standing on the promises: Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28
Some 50 years ago, Merton warned us about what can happen when “all words have become alike.”
First Sunday of Advent (Isaiah 64:1-9; 1 Corinthians 1:3-9)
The preacher must remind those who feel worthless already that Isaiah is not trying to make them feel worse.
Reign of Christ Sunday (Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Psalm 95:1-7a; Matthew 25:31-46)
Does our discomfort over God’s judgment come from the fear of taking sides? Or the fear of being found on the wrong one?
Help wanted
A mere two years after publishing an absorbing study of anger, Garret Keizer has produced a probing work on an even thornier subject....
Righteous rage
The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin. By Garret Keizer. Jossey-Bass, 363 pp., $22.95
...Plain old sloth: A case of soul-weariness
I’ve had plenty of chances to laugh at myself in the last year....
Disciplines of listening
Barbara Brown Taylor's concise, pithy and challenging prose is evidence that she is practicing what she preaches: that Christian pastors take more care with the words they use and treat language with economy, courtesy and reverence.
Denise Levertov: Work that enfaiths
I will never forget the first time I heard Denise Levertov read her poetry....
To the contrary
By Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought. (Houghton Mifflin, 254 pp.)
...Poetry as testimony
I have long been an evangelist for poetry, a word which seems to engender as much cheer in the average American as the word "Calvinism." I am not easily discouraged, and in most of my speaking enga...
Gratitude at last
I have come to see gratitude as primary among the spiritual virtues, the wellspring, as it were. I also think it makes a suitable subject for my last column in the Faith Matters series.
...Sinatra in the bell tower: God's ear is attuned to the stark syntax of human need
One morning, as I stood on the hill west of town admiring the morning sky just after dawn, the tune on the carillon at the Catholic church caught my attention....