Peripatetic Pastor

Tag: Reformed theology

  • CONVERSATION IN AN OTTOMAN SITTING ROOM

    Mostar, Bosnia Our guide in Mostar, a city in Bosnia, was describing the war in the 90s. Earlier we had walked by a graveyard in what had been a small city park. The dates on the gravestones all ended in the same year, 1993. The people of Mostar buried their dead in the park because…

  • WHEN THINGS FALL APART

    HOPE IN A TIME OF DISINTEGRATION Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worst  Are full of passionate intensity.                  W.H. Yeats, “The Second…

  • SUPERSTITION

    How an Old Distinction between Religion and Superstition Speaks to Today SUPERSTITION I’ve been thinking lately about superstition. Not the funky 1972 Stevie Wonder hit, although it would make a great soundtrack for this piece: Very superstitious/Writing’s on the wallVery superstitious/Ladder’s ‘bout to fall Got the beat in your head? Hum it as you read.…

  • MORE (MOSTLY SHORT) NOTES ON HOW TO READ THE BIBLE WITH JOY

    MORE (MOSTLY SHORT) NOTES ON HOW TO READ THE BIBLE WITH JOY A few posts back I made a few suggestions about how to read the Bible with joy and a certain confidence. Five simple suggestions: To those five suggestions for reading the Bible, allow me to add five more, beginning with: 1. Laugh occasionally. The Bible…

  • CONTINGENCY

    A Lenten Meditation Yesterday was Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Ash Wednesday is about contingency—not contingency in the technical philosophical sense but the earthbound, timebound lives we live. As we are marked by ashes, the priest says, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you will return.” In his conversion poem, “Ash Wednesday,” T.…

  • THINKING ABOUT BIBLICAL AUTHORITY

    Reading the Bible with Joy Authority in Crisis We face a crisis of authority. Or, rather, crises of authority. Some of these are in matters of faith. My most recent post on reading the Bible ended with a question about biblical authority: When does the Bible say to the church: “Thus says the Lord”? When…

  • READING THE BIBLE WITH JOY

    Five Proposals for Discovering the Joy of the Bible I’ve lately been puzzling over the Bible. Not the Bible itself but the joylessness of its readers. Or would be readers. In the minds of many the Bible is a forbidding and severe book, a book of thou-shalt-nots. For others, an ancient self-help book that doesn’t…

  • HEROD, THE MAGI, AND CHRISTMAS 2025

    When the Bible Speaks Directly to Our Time The scriptures sometimes jump off the page into the headlines, as if they were written yesterday. Sunday’s gospel reading was a case in point. For churches that follow the liturgical year Sunday was the second Sunday after Christmas. The gospel reading was the last half of the…

  • THE INFANTILIZATION OF THE HUMAN RACE

    How Theology Reduces Us to Children A couple of posts back (available here), I reflected on biblical views of evil—evil as the coming apart of things. I mentioned in that essay that the T of Tulip (total depravity) in Reformed theology has a way of letting us off the hook. We need not, in fact in…

  • SACRAMENTAL COMMUNITY ONE MORE TIME

    A Note on Retrieving Church Just a note. In my last post, on sacramental community (“Retrieving Church”), I missed what might be the most important point. In the somewhat wonky center section of the essay (the part I suggested you can skip), I described a shift in medieval thinking about the body of Christ. In…