Tag Archives: Christianity
Sermon: The God of the Center
(I preached this sermon on August 15, 2010–the Feast of St. Mary, the Mother of Our Lord–at Wicker Park Lutheran Church in Chicago) Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. On Friday the great film critic and now equally great blogger Roger Ebert offered […]
California Diarist: Fruit of the Earth and Work of Human Hands
(I wrote this in September, 2010) It had been eleven years since I’d last seen Tom. At the end of a premature and ill-advised visit to Deep Springs not three months after I had graduated, I sat out where the college’s access road meets the state highway that splits the valley. It was early, perhaps […]
New York Diarist: Into Your Hands
(I wrote this in December, 2010) Four long years had passed since I last visited New York, and it seemed at times as though my once-frequent trips out there had become a thing of the past. But a friend of long duration, with whom I had walked and talked through the interminable ELCA ordination process, […]
My Back Pages: Pastors Hating on Weddings
(This column was published in The Daily on June 12, 2011 under the title “Tied Up in Knots.” Since The Daily is no longer extant, I am posting it here) Wedding season is a challenging one for pastors. On the one hand, we don’t mind the extra income weddings provide for our congregations and ourselves. […]
Chicago Diarist: Home
(I wrote this in July, 2008, shortly after my internship at Bethel-Imani Lutheran church ended) Early last year, after buying yet another friend a copy of Gilead to see him on his journey away from Chicago, I read the opening on the train. I made myself stop after this: I don’t know how many times people have […]
God in the Gluten
I wrote about the Vatican directives for the bread and wine in the Eucharist for Religion Dispatches: The genius of the eucharist, in strictly human terms, is in its simplicity: bread and wine, the everyday foods of Mediterranean antiquity, enter the ritual process to become body and blood. The elements are plain and common, so […]
My Back Pages: Puritans and Medievals
(This op-ed originally appeared in The Daily on May 20, 2012, under the name ‘Flunking History.’ It is no longer extant, so I am posting it here) In a 2009 foreign policy speech, Mitt Romney used the word “medieval” to deride the aims of jihad. The jihadists, he claimed, intend to drag “the entire world […]
The Lollards Were Awesome
My newest piece for the Reformation 500th anniversary edition of Let’s Talk: Living Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod: And it is in this surviving vernacular literature that we can sense the real import of the Lollard movement. Wycliffe’s translations, unlike later efforts, did not return to Greek or Hebrew, but rendered the Vulgate in […]
Brutally Ordinary Things 