12th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C, RCL)

I relate to physical sickness more easily than mental illness. So does our culture.

Transformation often has a price. There is a cost to freedom, even freedom from demons.

Many people are bound. Some don’t even know it. The difference between being free and being bound is at the center of our Gospel text this week.

People assume that silence and peace can be simply harnessed together, silence as Xanax for the soul. But that's not how deserts work.

Sacramentality is the breath of Christian life—life that springs from the sacraments and life that yearns to return to them.

I loved writing Wearing God in part because it allowed me to rove around archives from more or less every century of the Christian past. The biblical images for God that most (American?) churches today largely ignore were decidedly not ignored in earlier eras.

What goes on in the mind of a leader who tires of building consensus and just strives to get things done?

Despite bleak forecasts, many of today’s teenagers refuse to buy the marketed temptations to despair and fear. They’ll find a way.

Like many baptized, praying Christians her age, my daughter is not a regular churchgoer. What difference does it make?

When the angel of the Lord told Elijah to go to Mount Horeb, Elijah knew he would encounter God. After all, Horeb was where God spoke to Moses with fire and to Israel with a storm. But for Elijah, God didn’t show up as expected. 

No conservative I know has seriously argued that same-sex couples need sanctification any less than opposite-sex couples do.

For decades, my students have failed to grasp the resurrection of the body as an article of faith.

To the Ephesians and Philippians, to the Galatians and anyone who would listen, Paul’s message was the same.