This week I examined how Americans have prayed for elections, dug into the college majors of American presidents, and recorded a podcast about the future of sports at American colleges and universities. Elsewhere: • My daughter had to do a unit on the Electoral College in social studies this week. She’s not the only one wondering … More That Was The Week That Was
A couple of rules I live my life by: Use the lectionary as an opportunity to read scriptures that are easy to skip over. Don’t embarrass myself or anyone else by writing about sex. Normally, these two don’t come into conflict. But I’m writing a daily series of devotions, and today’s readings include some verses … More The With-God Life: Song of Songs
As I’ve restarted this series of daily devotionals, I find myself drawn more to the Old Testament selections from the lectionary than the gospel and epistle texts. Maybe that’s because I’m in the middle of reading Separated Siblings: An Evangelical Understanding of Jews and Judaism, by former North Park Seminary president Jay Phelan. Growing out … More The With-God Life: Commandments
I once called Easter Monday “that forgotten day of the church calendar seemingly dedicated to, well, getting on with our lives.” This year, when nothing feels all that normal, it’s probably less true that Easter’s joy will “[dissolve] into the mundane, predictable routine of the workweek.” But under quarantine or not, we’ll continue to spend … More The With-God Life: Call and Response
Since Isaiah 42:1-9 starts Holy Week, I came to it prepared to read today’s lection as an oracle about Jesus: Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen; in whom my soul delights; I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift … More The With-God Life: “How shall I call upon my God?”
[Jesus answered the Sadducees] “…as for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is God not of the dead, but of the living.” And when the crowd heard it, they … More The With-God Life: God of the Living
Tonight HBO premieres the first episode of a six-part adaptation of Philip Roth’s 2004 novel, The Plot Against America. Since its alternate history premise centers on the subject of my current writing project, I thought some of my readers might be interested in my response to Roth’s book — originally published at The Anxious Bench after … More Charles Lindbergh and The Plot Against America
Greetings from the Gerald R. Ford International Airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan! After a terrific couple days at the Conference on Faith and History, I’m waiting for my flight home and thought I’d share a few of the pieces I’ve been reading the last seven days: • With all that’s been going on at my … More That Was The Week That Was
Let me suspend my Lenten hiatus just long enough to share the text of the sermon I delivered yesterday at Salem Covenant Church in New Brighton, Minnesota. It was the fourth in a “Path to Renewal” series inspired by The Pietist Option: Hope for the Renewal of Christianity, with my co-author — and Salem’s senior pastor … More The Path to Renewal: Be a Priest! (John 2:13-22)
“[T]he most distinctive feature of history as an academic discipline,” I once argued, “is the relative paucity of the sources available. All we’ve got to go on are whatever artifacts survive the passing of time, and most of those sources erode. Past supporting preservation and archival efforts (including oral history projects), there’s not much historians can do … More Why We Can Remember the Holocaust
