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So, I’ve finally read Rob Bell’s Love Wins and am working on a review. When I think about all the controversy surrounding the book, I wish more people had a chance to take a study seminar I took while studying at Regent College.

One of the funny sidelights of owning a chiminea (and Facebooking about making fires in it on a frequent basis) is that I have kind of become the "Parish incinerator for holy objects." Things like slightly "off-smelling" chrism, leftover blessed palm fronds, or worn out corporals or altar linens seem to find their way into my chiminea to be burned. I think part of it is folks in my parish know I love to burn stuff, and they also know my fire-sitting spot is, at least to me, a holy space.

I was really struck by a phrase in Chet Raymo's blog post "A Saturday Reprise." He begins by quoting Bilhah in The Red Tent who responds to Zilpah's expression of fear at leaving a place where customs and gods are known and moving to the unknown by saying "Every place has its holy names, its trees and high places. There will be gods where we go."

Many years ago on a mission trip in Haiti, our group was ministering in the isolated mountains in the west near the Dominican Republic. The village where we stayed was where the road ended. To say it was a “road” was an exaggeration.

As Americans were complaining about all the snow this winter, arguing about the value of NPR and PBS, and learning that we suffer from an “enlargement of self,” the Japanese were dying by the thousands as solid ground gave way and the sea roiled and raged, consuming whole cities.

There is a region between home and the forbidden, states a friend and colleague of mine. It's not a border in the NRSV, but a region, an actual space that Jesus goes to. It's where the unwanted are.

When we say, with the author of 1 John, that "God is Love," what do we mean by this? According to this text, if taken quite literally, it is not simply that God loves whom God chooses to love, but God's essence is love.