“I’m worth as much as you,”    while true, Yearns upward much as Eve’s son Cain;    and vainforever proves such self-promotion.

A Story Poem for Proper 16, connecting the question, “Who do You Say that I am?” with Romans 12. 

A Drama for Proper 16.  Shiphrah and Puah
Engaging, humorous, a dialogue between the two midwives in Exodus 1.

In the last two centuries, theologians have been abandoning the view of divine revelation.  This move has radically changed, if not actually rendered obsolete, the role once played by confessions and creeds.

This article is a reflective piece about a retreat I led (with a colleague) called “A Time Apart: Creating Sabbaths in Your Life”.  It deals with the intersection of art and oases and how we used a painting by Picasso to discover and elicit the rhythms of our lives.

You have become the most widely known person in the world. And this in spite of the fact that, as my six-year old granddaughter said a few years ago, ‘You don’t hear much about Jesus these days!’

Faith is not about getting our doctrines right. Nobody gets the doctrines right. It’s about doing the right things.

Matthew 16:13-28; Romans 6:5-11 This commentary is going directly through Matthew without regard for the traditional Christian liturgical year, so will not skip to the end of the gospel to Jesus’ “great commission” to “make followers of …

In this article, Fred Plumer asks the question: with the dwindling numbers in the churches, is there a future for the church?

We walk where reason may not tread
    By faith’s audacious guiding,
    Beyond the light by knowledge shed
    We quest in grace confiding.

It is 2011 and gays and lesbians can serve in the military and in the Presbyterian Church USA. My prayer is that my GLBTQ sisters and brothers…will celebrate these victories.

As the Church dwindles within the American psyche and society becomes deeply aware of global responsibility, it is high time the Church change.

I reject the virgin birth, sinless life, divinity, and physical resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.  And that’s just a short list of the traditional Christian doctrines that I don’t buy into. There are a lot of open-minded, …

Harold Camping says that the rapture described in 1 Thessalonias 4 will occur on May 21, 2011, and that God will destroy the entire Universe on October 21, 2011.  Unlike John the Baptist and Jesus, Camping offers no chance for salvation.

The American clergy is suffering from burnout [and]…there’s a more fundamental problem that no amount of rest and relaxation can help solve: congregational pressure to forsake one’s highest calling.

Sea Raven juxtaposes recent military events with the Gospel to make an eye-opening point about the cost of retributive justice.

After decades of debate, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on Tuesday struck down a barrier to ordaining gays, ratifying a proposal that removes the celibacy requirement for unmarried clergy, in the latest mainline Protestant move toward accepting gay relationships.

The overwhelming probability is that the familiar details of the cross are not the result of historic memory at all, but are rather liturgical interpretations of who it was who died on the cross and what his death meant. A quick analysis of the details from this narrative reveals that they were drawn not from the memory of eye witnesses, but from the scriptures of the Jewish people, primarily from Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. So even the central story of the final events in Jesus’ life now looks more like the work of an interpretative imagination than it does the work of a historian.