Posts from 2012

Out in the Wilderness by C. Christopher Smith (1/3/2012)
...or those socialized into modern American mythology” writes Ched Myers, “so would John’s garb have invoked the great prophet Elijah for Mark’s readers.” John is a prophet in the same vein as Elijah, humble, far removed from the halls of power in his day, and yet God used him to prepare the way for the Messiah through whom all creation would be reconciled. Perhaps the most relevant aspect of Joh...
The Goon Priest by Jim McCoy (1/11/2012)
... with musicians? (They might have to tone down the bohemian debauchery a little bit). In Egan’s novel, the Bay Area punk band member confesses that her cohorts live privileged lives in houses of “Easter-egg colors,” but “the second Scotty lets the garage door down, we’re suddenly enraged.” In the rewrite, you’d have the honest soul who admits to the details of a bourgeois life and to...
The Far End of the Net by Jessie Larkins (1/17/2012)
...ts calling to be a conduit of God’s grace for all of the nations rather than its terminus, and felt both sympathy and anger towards a self-centered prophet more concerned with his public standing as a prophet than with the destiny of an entire nation. For Jews, the entirety of Jonah is read out publicly in the synagogue each year on the afternoon of Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the...
The Holy One of God by Janice Love (1/25/2012)
...son of Epiphany in the first chapter of Mark’s gospel. For a gospel that is very much about being on the move – forty times in sixteen chapters the Greek word for immediately/at once/then occurs – this seems counterintuitive. It is not, though, if we consider that Epiphany is the season for the church to try and get its head and heart and life around just who Jesus is and what is the good news...
Power Politics and the Politics of Weakness by Doug Lee (2/1/2012)
...cal parties, and super PACs climb over one another to gain access to the levers of power. Could it be that the church is little different in its craving for potency? Waning influence in American culture, declining membership, or just the plain desire for some kind of noticeable impact on our communities makes us long for the capacity to make stuff happen. If only we had more money, more influen...
Wade in the Water by Jake Wilson (2/8/2012)
...com/yearb/epiphb6.htm" target="_blank">Mark 1:40-45</a> Eighteen years ago, the Mississippi Annual Conference planted the next “mega church” in a small but rapidly growing community just outside of the state capital of Jackson. The congregation started with an average worship attendance of around 90, a number that has dropped slowly but consistently over the years. When I was appoin...
Plastic Minds and Magic Eyes by Ragan Sutterfield (2/14/2012)
...in red and white stripes. “Where’s Waldo”, “Magic Eye”--we love seeing games where we must pick out an image from visual confusion. Perhaps this love comes from our history as hunters and gathers, when we had to unmask the camouflage of animals in order to gain our daily food. Whatever it is, we love seeing what was invisible made suddenly apparent. The ability to see beyond the obvious is a...
Submerging Church by Ekklesia Project (2/21/2012)
...e at the same time questioning and critiquing the conditions of that life we share. Since this community lives from its center, the risen Jesus Christ, its boundaries are porous and permeable with arms outstretched to everyone who encounters it. <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slowchurch/2012/02/20/submerging-church-ekklesia-project-guest-post-by-lee-wyatt/">Read more...</a>...
Living in a Material World: Lent and Our Bodies by Debra Dean Murphy (2/22/2012)
...called Christians to. Generally, “spiritual” is meant to signal a concern with matters of the heart or the soul or the deepest self. More pointedly, it almost always springs from–even as it continues to endorse–the tired dualisms of modernity that have divided body from soul, matter from spirit, earth from heaven. This false divide, as <a href="http://www.presenttruthmag.com/archive/XXXVIII/38-...
Dead in the Water by Brian Volck (2/23/2012)
...our deep habits. The traditional practices of Lent – prayer, fasting, and almsgiving – were never meant to make good people better, much less make them more appealing to God. Lenten practices are nothing less than little deaths, killing off the unnecessary within what we like to call “ourselves,” chiseling away chunks of rough marble hiding the delicate human figure inside. Not that we are the...
Following Jesus One Step at a Time by Kyle Childress (2/29/2012)
... Jesus was talking with his disciples. This was not a lesson for which they had set aside time; no appointments or class schedules had been made. They were on the way, in the middle of following Jesus, watching him serve and heal and preach and touch, and in turn, they helped and learned what being on the way with Jesus looked like. Out of breath, walking as fast as they could to keep up, and lo...
“The Kingdom Will Prevail” by Brent Laytham (3/1/2012)
...ay poor” — with the parables in the verses that follow. The popular wisdom will not remain true; God is at work transforming creation, but the transformation is a slow one that starts with the tiniest of seeds and grows outward from there, from the grassroots, as it were… <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slowchurch/2012/03/01/the-kingdom-will-prevail-a-slow-church-related-sermon-on-mark-424-...
Anger in Church by Debra Dean Murphy (3/7/2012)
... assistance, a man whose idea of a workout is a forty-day fast." </div> Garret Keizer, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Anger-Essays-Sometimes-Deadly/dp/0787973106/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331054854&sr=1-1">The Enigma of Anger</a>  We live in angry ti...
What Space Must the Church Occupy? by Ekklesia Project (3/10/2012)
...mily traditions, how we’ve lived our lives with one another that ultimately matters. Bill’s words provided food for thought for many of us that day. While I’m still somewhere in the second phase (or at least would like to think I am), my “Jewishness” is clearly emerging, particularly as I find myself often pondering the life of my mom and dad, the world they experienced as young pare...
Naked Intent by Brian Volck (3/14/2012)
...e news. (see John 4) Is it because I, scared of what people will think, prefer coming at night, tripping over words and their meanings? Maybe you know how that feels. Maybe you’re Nicodemus, too. To know is so satisfying, but it’s a lonely satisfaction, accomplishing far less than I pretend: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is ...
The Problem with Rowan Williams by Ekklesia Project (3/21/2012)
...d literary criticism - his deepest commitment has always been to the cultivation of community rather than to any particular intellectual project. If his critics complained that he was an unusually academic archbishop, Cambridge will also find him to be an unusually priestly scholar. To read the rest click <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/03/20/3459479.htm" target="_b...
The Deep Hope of Easter by C. Christopher Smith (3/22/2012)
...ch and now the Christians are the people on whom the blessing of God rests (and, of course, the Jews are outsiders, heretics and the ones who had Jesus crucified, and thus worthy of having all manner of violence inflicted upon them). Is this really the sort of God, covenant and people that Jeremiah is proclaiming here? I hope not, but let’s look a little deeper. Gerhard Lohfink, in his classi...
The White Savior Industrial Complex by Ekklesia Project (3/22/2012)
...e is much more to doing good work than "making a difference." There is the principle of first do no harm. There is the idea that those who are being helped ought to be consulted over the matters that concern them.</blockquote> read the entire article here: <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/the-white-savior-industrial-complex/254843/1/">The White Savior Industrial C...
Slowing Down and Reflecting Cross-generationally by Ekklesia Project (3/26/2012)
..., small groups, and elaborate worship services while I struggle to keep cranking out the multitude of marginally-attended events at my own congregation. Maybe Pastors have been double-minded in this way as well, but I soon realized that my frustration with low turnout and the endless cycle of busyness was not allowing me, or our congregation, to share the best of what God had given us with each ot...
A Token Performance by Jim McCoy (3/28/2012)
...geant as part of a gathering of area churches. Several of us chosen ones wore either a crown of rejoicing, a crown of righteousness, a crown of glory, or a crown of life. As the appropriate Scripture passage was read, each one of us, dressed as royalty, processed down a long auditorium aisle and placed our crowns on a stage altar. The producer/director/stage manager/costume designer (the sister ...
Reading the Bible with Trayvon Martin by Ekklesia Project (4/2/2012)
...esidential campaign. The deep pain at the center of this conversation reveals a wound that we often try to hide, despite the fact that it will not go away. Our history of race-based slavery colors everything in America. President Obama was both honest and revealing, I think, when he said in a press conference last week, “If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon.” To read the rest click <a...
Risen Indeed by Joel Shuman (4/4/2012)
...cyclopedia article on death and dying, and I wonder if I am up to the task. In particular, I wonder if I have it in me to tell the truth about death. The fact is death intrigues me even as it scares me. I think about it all the time. I read books and essays about it. I have my students read and talk about it. And yet, I find that I rarely tell them or myself the truth about death. That truth, ...
"My Lord and My God" by Janice Love (4/12/2012)
...rom the practice of requiring men to cover their clothed genitals with their hand as they swore that what they were about to say was “the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. The implication being that they were staking their own future generations on their testimony. This was in the times when only males were considered as witnesses. Ed suggests that witness may be, therefore, the better wo...
Taste and See by Jake Wilson (4/20/2012)
... filled with disembodied souls all hugging and congratulating each other on their arrival. This is the place where we walk down streets of gold with our long deceased Aunt Sally and where God sits in a “reaaally big” chair (this according to Colton Burpo, the child author of “Heaven is for Real”). This week’s lectionary text from Luke challenges our common conceptions of life after death.<!--...
The Patron Saint of the Tongue-Tied by Doug Lee (4/24/2012)
...works out to be only operable in acceptable times and places: Sundays mornings within a self-identified arena of worship, but not Monday mornings in the workplace or classroom. Our kids’ elementary school banned biblical characters in this year’s hero essay project after a second-grader from our congregation wrote about Jesus last year. To punch through such invisible yet resilient barriers in Ame...
CFI and Slow Church by Ekklesia Project (5/2/2012)
...layperson. To enter into the conversation requires a grasp of the language that is employed. The same is true for the church. It is not that we, as disciples of Jesus, consciously seek to utilize jargon that excludes or alienates those not already part of the in-group. But followers of Christ do sometimes traffic in terminologies and concepts that are essential to a proper understanding...
Slow and Abundant Faithfulness by Jenny Williams (5/2/2012)
...ve discussions about the purpose of being a called-out people. I was amazed to watch how discussions about formation and Christian practice aided this congregation in their faithfulness, both as individual Christians and as a church engaged with their local community. We undertook study and conversation by semester, meeting for seven to nine weeks each “term.” The first fall, we studied “The ...
Believe It or Not by Ragan Sutterfield (5/3/2012)
...il, etc. For a time she continued in her role as a minister—albeit a faithless one. The cognitive dissonance eventually led her to “come out” as an atheist at convention of non-believers. The video of her coming out went viral on the internet and soon enough her congregation found out, in the way of many an internet age breakup, through social media. Many shunned her, job interviews...
Show Us the Way by Brian Volck (5/10/2012)
... two companions were assassinated as they drove toward evening mass through the fields near El Paisnal, El Salvador. Fr. Grande knew where he was going. During his five years as parish priest in the nearby town of Aguilares, he formed Christian base communities, trained lay delegates, and vocally opposed government attempts to silence Salvadoran priests who worked with and organized pea...
Assembling in the Spirit by Debra Dean Murphy (5/23/2012)
...erence together, Episcopalians and Baptists convene, and Presbyterians generally assemble (or assemble generally). Long-time participants in these gatherings and others like them might say, with a cynical wink, that, except for the “all together” part (and the being “in one place” part), these meetings are a real blast—productive, enjoyable, edifying . . . . . . Not.  The recent U...
The Way the World Works? by C. Christopher Smith (5/29/2012)
...hese has led many Christians into the sort of gnostic dualism that condemns the flesh and elevates the spirit. In recent years, a subtle sort of Christian Gnosticism – that literary critic Harold Bloom has called “the American Religion” – has tempted us to be careless in our stewardship of our bodies and the creation at large (the “God is going to destroy it anyway” mentality). In the late 1990s,...
Feasting Michael Sattler by Ekklesia Project (6/1/2012)
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And So We Speak by Janice Love (6/8/2012)
...ek, Easter and Pentecost. In the light of our travel once again around the life of the Son that gives us life, we pick up the continuous reading through of our Scriptures. And we find Paul speaking. Paul speaks the truth – the truth of his and our vulnerability. We are wasting away: our bodies, our buildings, the work of our hands, the dream of a church according to our cons...
Eyes to See by Jessie Larkins (6/13/2012)
...The prophet Isaiah warned, and Mark quotes just prior to the telling of these parables, that people would “look, but not perceive, and may indeed listen, but not understand” (Mark 4:12). Like Isaiah’s warning, the passage from 1 Samuel plays off of this same distinction of looking (nabat) but not seeing or understanding (ra’a). Samuel’s initial instinct to ano...
Preaching the Terrors (and Wonders) by Jim McCoy (6/21/2012)
... full of holy terrors as it is of holy wonders,” and while we’d like “to approach the terrors as stray bullets outside God’s plan,” the fact is that we cannot avoid either the terrors or the wonders without avoiding part of the truth (“Preaching the Terrors,” Leadership Journal, Spring 1992). The surest way NOT to preach the terrors is to jerry-build so-called “spi...
The Encounter More Than the Cure by Brian Volck (6/26/2012)
...things, a cheer squad for Richard Dawkins) began an ad campaign on city buses in UK with signs declaring, “There probably is no God, so relax and enjoy your life.” This led, as the BHA no doubt intended, to a torrent of unhelpful comments from an array of sources – pro, con, and otherwise – claiming to have special insight on the matter. One observation, however, stuck with me: namely that signs a...
The Anguish of Imperfect Communion by Ekklesia Project (6/28/2012)
...my roots. And then I discovered a group of people who had been agonizing over this division for years before me. In the many honest and in-depth discussions I’ve been a part of since, it’s been clear that these people who are doing their best to bridge two Christian traditions share a deep longing for a fuller communion than we are as yet able to have, as well as an acute awareness that what we ...
Rethinking “Rethink Church” by Ekklesia Project (7/3/2012)
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Amazing Jesus by Janice Love (7/4/2012)
... pleasant weather. Already here in just the 6th chapter, however, Jesus, stepping onto the stage fully grown, has been baptized, called his disciples, been proclaiming the good news and teaching with authority, exorcising unclean spirits, healing the sick and the lame, stated his lordship over the Sabbath, redefined his family, calmed the sea and the wind, raised a child from the ...
The Banquets of Two Kingdoms by Ragan Sutterfield (7/11/2012)
... Just before our gospel reading this Sunday (RCL) we witness Jesus sending his disciples out to proclaim this Kingdom of Life, completely without any supplies or tools of coercion. The only thing they have is Good News. “So they went out,” we are told, “and proclaimed that all should repent.” Repentance is always a turning from and a turning to, and so to give us some understand...
Our Weak God by Matthew Morin (7/14/2012)
...oes so, but his teaching is interrupted by a demonic spirit. In Mark 3, Jesus’s actions in the synagogue anger some of his rivals, who in turn begin plotting ways to kill him. And, as you just heard in today’s scripture reading, Jesus’s third attempt to teach in the synagogue is met with scorn by members of his own hometown. So, three times, Jesus enters the synagogue to teach, and three times,...
The Shepherd Who Feeds Us by Debra Dean Murphy (7/17/2012)
...st Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time There is striking beauty in the appointed texts for this weekend. And there are shepherds. And the shepherds are beautiful. I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall not fear any longer, or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord. (Jer. 23:4). The Lord is my she...
Between the Narrative and the Psalm by Jim McCoy (7/25/2012)
...s. I have been stripped bare…." - John Edwards, August, 2008 "I did an awful, awful lot that was wrong. There is no one else re...
Discerning What Displeases the Lord by Kyle Childress (7/31/2012)
...ed his power to have Uriah killed by the Ammonites. The last sentence of chapter 11 says, “But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord.” The next sentence, which begins chapter 12, says, “And the Lord sent Nathan to David.” My question is “how does the church come up with Nathans?” Or as Moses wished, “How can all of God’s people be prophets?” How do we grow and form th...
There is No They by Ekklesia Project (8/6/2012)
...k.com/2012/07/31/there-is-no-they/">full post</a>....
The Mystery of Agency by Mark Ryan (8/8/2012)
... his son and the seemingly inevitable course of violence. David’s desire for his son to be spared in the imminent attack upon his forces echoes his willingness for reconciliation following Absalom’s exile upon the killing of Amnon (2 Samuel 13:28-29). There, he joined in the prayer of a woman (a proxy for Joab) that the Lord be invoked so that “the avenger of blood slay no more.” (2 Samuel 14:1...
Reading Around the text by John Jay Alvaro (8/15/2012)
...rds for women in worship. The Lectionary mitigates that risk, and a host of other dangerous tendencies, by laying out readings in coherent and thoughtful units. But sometimes the preacher must interrogate the given pericopes, always watching the edges for things that have fallen away. In the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, we encounter a cluster of texts that converge around the idea of Wisdo...
Choose Wisely; Remember Well by Ekklesia Project (8/19/2012)
...ere, <a href="http://vox-nova.com/2012/08/17/choose-wisely-an-election-year-anamnesis/">Julia Smucker</a> echoes the campaign's recommendation that readers celebrate the Eucharist on US Election Day, referring to it as an Anamnesis, the liturgical act of Eucharistic remembrance, a call in this case to remember, among other things: <blockquote>that real power in this world — the po...
The Eucharist and the Hollow Place by Danny Yencich (8/20/2012)
...t is bread, it is wine, yet it is somehow so much more, for as Christ himself says, it is also eternal life. At the center of Christian worship is this meal, and this meal is the future hope of eternal life. Yet at the center of common human experience is not now, nor has it ever been, anything remotely like eternal life. For much of the world, human life is short and brutish, ugly and bleak. ...
The Heart of the Matter by Heather Carlson (8/30/2012)
... rituals the Pharisees were so focused on? But, before we get to Jesus' response, we need to pause and really hear the Pharisees. I know my Sunday school education taught me these figures were "bad." Cast as one-dimensional characters, we knew that when Pharisees appeared on the flannelgraph, trouble was afoot. They were people to be judged and scorned, not those with whom our sc...
Hearing and Obeying by Brian Volck (9/5/2012)
... wasn’t available to every praying person. Furthermore, she never claimed to speak for God to others and, as far as I could tell, God’s speaking to her was more important than the words themselves, if indeed what she understood herself to hear were words. In truth, I’ve never understood quite what she meant. Her experience was not mine, though I’ve never doubted she had profound encounters with re...
Rebuked by Janice Love (9/15/2012)
...to find himself debating with a Gentile woman, who is seeking healing for her daughter, and opening the hearing and speaking of a Greek man. A Jesus surprised about the direction his mission is taking may not be what we are used to envisioning. We get yelled at this week. Yelled at by both Wisdom and Jesus. In public. After setting the stage at the beginning of Proverbs with t...
Being Church: Reflections on How to Live as the People of God by Ekklesia Project (9/17/2012)
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A Hard, Simple Truth by Ragan Sutterfield (9/19/2012)
...it can be an incredible experience of seeing new places, embracing the beauty of creation, and catching up with old friends. On the other it can be a painful disruption of sacred routines, full of stress filled hours finding ones way in unknown places with a crying baby and hours of hellish interstate. I alternate back and forth, but lately I’ve been on the grumpy side, missing the hard fought r...
How Much is Enough? by Kyle Childress (9/25/2012)
...eadaches.” Next frame, while he is slumped in his seat in bumper-to-bumper traffic, “Because of you our central cities are empty and I waste half my life in traffic to the burbs.” Next frame, kids are getting in and out of the car, “Because of you my family is one big frantic snarl of hectic schedules.” Next frame, while holding his paunch with littered paper cups and french-fry containers around ...
Why World Communion Sunday Is a Bad Idea by Debra Dean Murphy (10/2/2012)
... "special" is exactly what it is not. We don't think of the air we breathe as "special," the breakfast we eat as "special." These things are gifts, of course--breath and food--but it is in their givenness, their ordinariness that they are the means for life and health. In Clyde, Missouri, the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration cut unleavened bread into communion wafers and gather ...
Strange New World by Jim McCoy (10/11/2012)
...…. Seek the Lord and live…. Seek good and not evil, that you may live; and so the Lord, the God of hosts, will be with you.” Check. Got it. Now what? Right away Amos makes it known that the right response is not as obvious as one might think. “Forget about going to the traditional holy places like Bethel or Gilgal,” he says. Even though sacrifices and rituals were re...
A Right to an Answer? by Mark Ryan (10/17/2012)
...s” between Job and his friends (chs 3-31), the “Elihu speeches” (chs 32-37) and two speeches by God each followed by a response by Job (38.1-42.6). An epilogue (42.7-17) brings the book to a close. After setting the stage by the reading from the prologue, the lectionary catapults us into the center of the dialogue between Job and his friends. From last week’s selection (Job 23.1-9, 16-17), we ...
Home is Often a Troubled Place by John Jay Alvaro (10/24/2012)
...y were weeping. The return home is imaged in sadness. They are anxious travelers. They are totally vulnerable. The women are having babies beside the streams. The blind folks are still in darkness. The disabled still limp. So where is the good news in this situation? Is nothing here being made right? I suppose coming home is the praise-worthy event. But even that is a mixed bag. Home...
First Things First by Heather Carlson (10/31/2012)
... On most Christian calendars, this Sunday is the 23rd after Pentecost. Those with longer historical roots may also mark November 4 as All Saint's Sunday. I suspect, however, in many a preacher and parishioner's mind these are overshadowed by the calendar that proclaims this as the Sunday before the American quadrennial election. One more public opportunity to remind parishioners of their citize...
The Lord Upholds the Orphan and the Widow by Danny Yencich (11/5/2012)
...and the prophetic proclamation of Jubilee. The church does justice in fits and starts, it seems. We started off particularly strong, with the Messiah coming onto the scene and announcing the Reign of God, a world-order marked by mutual self-giving and a reversal of first-century patronage politics. But lest I be called a naïve restorationist with a rose-colored rearview mirror, it should be noted...
Living into the Mystery by Brian Volck (11/14/2012)
...l of life now wither and die. We see signs in the trees and know that winter is near. For those in the United States, it is also post-election season. Despite the predictable posturing of winners and losers alongside quadrennial promises of pragmatic cooperation and “reaching across the aisle,” it’s difficult to find real joy in the just concluded, nearly two-year electoral process that left ...
So It Is To Be. Amen. by Janice Love (11/21/2012)
...to Jeremiah, Isaiah sings to God that he will not be afraid. Jesus says it the most - to his disciples and to those he heals. I remember once making this claim to a group of youth I was training (a more accurate translation of the Greek word didache, one of the ancient marks of the church, than “teaching”). One of them looked at me incredulously and wondered, honestly, if that was ev...
Preparing for Disaster by Ragan Sutterfield (11/28/2012)
...ough, and then there seems to always be the guy who didn’t see it coming. The “I was just going to wait it out” kind of guy. You have to wonder about those people—every siren is going off, the new channels shriller than ever, big winds sweeping through and yet they decide to just sit there until the flood waters come in and they swim through their front door. They just can’t believe that the wa...
Outside the Inn-siders by Kyle Childress (12/5/2012)
...ing with Luke. In the previous chapter, the well-known and much beloved Christmas story of Luke 2, Mary and Joseph are told there is no room in the Inn and they must go outside, to somewhere else to have the baby, whom we know is none other than the very Word of God incarnate. Furthermore, “And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night” ...
This is Good News? by Debra Dean Murphy (12/12/2012)
... These words from this week's lectionary epistle are also the text of the introit of the mass for the third Sunday of Advent. Thus on Gaudete Sunday, when Advent's sober mood is broken a little and the pink candle on the wreath is lit, we remember that we are invited to "rejoice in the Lord always." These words are so familiar that perhaps we have lost the sense of irony in saying or singing t...
A Multitude of Ruptures by Jim McCoy (12/19/2012)
...n doing their vital and admirable work are described as “compassionate, not preachy.” Those of us who not only have to preach but believe we should preach have been faced with how in God’s name do we preach the last two Sundays of Advent 2012, and how to do so in such a way in which compassion and preaching are not pitted against each other. This week I’ve been driven yet again to a ...
Rebuke as Generous Invitation by Matthew Morin (12/21/2012)
...rely, the events of the past week make it difficult to argue otherwise. Moreover, at first glance, today’s readings from Scripture don’t seem to be much help. “The Lord God is in your midst, a warrior who gives victory,” proclaims Zephaniah. What? God is a warrior? “Well there you have it!” our accusers shout. “This is the stuff of cults, and ancient people. Every tribe had its own d...
Holy Families? by Mark Ryan (12/26/2012)
...inction between happy and unhappy families is not a deep and important one. Perhaps Tolstoy meant to respect this important distinction when he wrote that “Happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” At the same time, I have often wondered how as a Christian the claiming of me by my family of origin and that of my family of adoption might be equally important in ...
Previous Year C links by Ekklesia Project (12/31/2012)
...Year C Advent 1 <a href="http://dev-ekklesiaproject-org:8080/blog/2009/11/spring-will-come-before-we-know-it/">http://dev-ekklesiaproject-org:8080/blog/2009/11/spring-will-come-before-we-know-it/</a> Advent 2 <a href="http://dev-ekklesiaproject-org:8080/blog/2009/12/who-bears-the-weight-of-empire/">http://dev-ekklesiaproject-org:8080/...