Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Peripatetic Pastor

  • HOMER AND HEGSETH

    Homer is having a moment, not least because of Emily Wilson, whose Odyssey translation appeared in 2017 and recently became the basis for a Christopher Nolan movie (see my comments on the movie here). She is currently working on a new Odyssey translation. Her Iliad appeared in 2023, and just this past month, she published…

  • THE CHALLENGE OF AI: ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE GARDEN OF EDEN

    AI This week past Elizabeth Dias, New York Times national religion correspondent, published in the Times an article with the provocative title: “Religious Scholars Met with Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them” (The New York Times, September 29, 2026). The lede for the piece was equally provocative: “In a series of private meetings, the company…

  • FINITUDE

    Thinking about Resurrection The Bible is about finitude—about this time-bound life we live here on earth. Most people come to the Bible not expecting this. They expect infinitude. They expect the Bible to be about immortal souls rather than mortal bodies, so prone as they are to failure. And of course the Bible is about…

  • A PAGAN IN ST. PETER’S

    REFLECTING ON THE DRAWING OF THEOLOGICAL LINES Buried deep below the choir of St. Peter’s church in Geneva, John Calvin’s church, is a well-preserved burial shrine for an ancient pagan chieftain of the 1st century BCE Allobrogian people. The site was discovered in the 1970s when St. Peter’s excavated below the cathedral to install a new…

  • THE ROAD TAKEN

    THE ROAD TAKEN This reflection began as a conversation with an old friend. As our conversations do, we wandered here and there and eventually into Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” the poem that begins famously: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I…

  • TRAJECTORIES

    WHERE IS ALL THIS GOING? In a recent and fascinating Substack post on white flight in Grand Rapids in the 1960s and 70s,  Kent Hendricks (my nephew) groups the Christian Reformed Church (CRC) of the time into three “minds.” He calls these three “pietist,” “confessionalist,” and “transformationalist.” In this, Hendricks follows a 1974  Reformed Journal article in which Nicholas Wolterstorff…

  • FACE TO FACE

    A SUNDAY MEDITATION Sometimes in a day things seem to add up, to make a point. Of course, many days are not like this. They seem to go first this way and then that, randomly. But occasionally what comes one’s way in a day seems, well, directional. For me, this past Sunday was a such…

  • A LARGER HOSPITALITY

    THE LESSON OF HOMER’S ODYSSEY Indulge me. I know that you come to my blog expecting something biblical and theological. I hope to continue to meet your expectations most times, turning up an insight here and there into the faith that most of us profess. This piece is not of that sort. In a way,…

  • ACCEPTING RIGHTEOUSNESS

    READING ROMANS Curious how a word or a phrase can jump out at you in a passage you’ve read countless times before. Preparing for my last post, Thinking Salvation, reading Romans 5 for, I don’t know, the thousandth time, what jumped out at me was verse 17, where Paul suggests that if we are to live…

  • THINKING SALVATION: Salvation in the Real World

    SAVED FROM WHAT? I’ve been thinking lately about salvation. “Salvation” is an odd sort of word. We rarely use it outside the church. Certainly, in a setting like this—a blog entitled The Peripatetic Pastor—you would expect any discussion of salvation to be biblical and theological, something perhaps in answer to the question: What must I do…