30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

The psalms of ascent press hard against the norms of our bootstrap culture.

Erin Raffety’s ethnographic study calls churches to repentance.

Sometimes I picture its author looking down at us and shaking his head.

They put us in touch with essential things that we know to be dear or wrong.

This psalm is hard to take.

More than a miracle story, this is a story of a call.

Reading and preaching Hebrews without supersessionism

The crowd's proximity to Jesus does not make them attentive to his priorities.

Why does the crowd demand that Bartimaeus be silent?

Sarah Huckabee Sanders was denied a meal at a Virginia restaurant. I wonder who's welcome at our table.

Unabated cultural frivolity rules our churches, too.

God’s response to Job is cold comfort when you have terminal cancer.

I mostly agree with Jeffrey Weiss about prayer. I think St. Paul would too.

How is it that the poems of a 17th-century aristocrat still resonate with us?

After enduring Job's calamities, his howling laments, the speeches of his "friends," a hymn to wisdom as an entr'acte, Job's plea of innocence, an awkward interruption by Elihu, and then four chapters of the LORD speaking from the whirlwind, we finally arrive at the 42nd and last chapter of Job.

We discover that no one much agrees what it means. 

New daughters and sons do not take the place of the lost ones. As a conclusion to the story of Job, this will not do.