Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year 2, NL)

In the Eastern church's art, Christ arises triumphantly and magnificently—but not alone.

The church at Corinth had many problems. Some simple kindness would have helped.

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.

Luke grounds the resurrection narrative in tangible details: the rock-hewn tomb, the linen cloth, the heavy stone, the fragrant spices. The reader can imagine the place and time. Then things fall off the map.

Karl Giberson offers a cultural history of the Bible's first human. It's an intriguing and unsettling story.

The story goes that God got a body. I’ve often pondered the relationship between incarnation and pain.

How can Paul navigate the choppy waters of a pagan environment, with its idols and temples? The obvious place to start is the Shema.

The preacher faces several challenges in these Ascension texts. How can we present Jesus’ departure from the earth as an occasion for not sorrow but celebration? How to translate the kingship and hierarchical language into imagery that speaks to a world no longer governed by kings and monarchs?

Feminist biblical scholars note a third challenge: How can we counter Luke-Acts' use of the Ascension to exert a degree of social control?

God's "consuming fire" is the fire of holy love. It doesn't await sinners in the future; it burns up sin itself.

I dreamed of meeting Adam in heaven. He wasn't hard to recognize; he looked like my great-uncle Harold, with the weight of his years melted off.

While Christian scholars have long questioned body-soul dualism, it remains common in church circles. This may finally be changing.

Last fall a friend of mine attended a lecture at the University of Mississippi delivered by Stanley Hauerwas. His talk was followed by an invigorating, hour-long question-and-answer dialogue. My friend reported that afterward he and some students, another minister and several laypeople went to someone’s house and talked about God for another hour or so. How novel.