Bible
When tragedies like the Virginia Tech massacre occur, we all share certain questions.
Why did this happen? How could this happen? Should anyone be blamed? Should someone be punished?
Often these questions lead us to seek a kind of rational explanation - so that the irrational can be folded into our sense of order in the universe. Often these questions send us on a search for someone to blame - a person, a group, the devil, even God.
I have found that our [...]
Tony Campolo offers some thoughts on "rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's."
I am on spring break with my family this week. As we approach Good Friday and Easter, I wanted to share with you the concluding chapter to my book, The Call to Conversion. It's a reflection on the cross and resurrection, "The Victory." It will be posted in three parts: Below is the first of the three.
But the angel said to the women, "Do not be afraid; for I know that [...]
I've been thinking about the recent controversy regarding James Dobson and other conservative religious leaders who wrote a letter criticizing Richard Cizik and the National Association of [...]
Bring the Biblical Garden by DuneCraft into your home and have weeding chores just like Jesus!
The Sermon on the Mount is one of the gems of the New Testament, comprised as it is of the spare beauty of the Beatitudes and the solemn pleas of the Lord’s Prayer.
Bob Ekblad has been reading the Bible with people who live on the margins—Chicano gang members, prison inmates, and undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States, among others
I was visiting a church at which pentecostal practices were gaining traction, bringing no small controversy with them.
I wonder if there are not many Sojourners readers who were dismayed with Brian McLaren’s essay in the March 2006 issue (“Found in Translation”)?
“Give us this day our daily bread.” The simplicity of the prayer that Jesus gave us can distract us from its wisdom and its challenge. At its heart is what Walter Brueggemann contends is God’s alternate food policy. The more ease and confidence we have in acquiring food, the easier it is to miss the radical edge that cuts through this prayer. As we appreciate this edge, our eyes open to the power of God’s economy of grace to feed the world with the food that genuinely delights and satisfies.
BREAD—or, generally, food—is a bundle of nutrients that, in the right quantities and combinations, are essential for life. But it is more than this, and reducing bread to these nutrients is the first temptation that Jesus faces. Jesus is hungry, and he has the power to alleviate this hunger by turning a stone to bread. Instead, he responds like this: “As it is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matthew 4:4). His choice is the opposite of that of the original humans, who, unheeding of the word of God, took and ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil because it was “good for food, a delight to the eyes, and desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6).
This separation of the bread that nourishes our bodies from the bread that is the word of God has in our time been reinforced by Karl Marx and by psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. But in Christ we know that our physical, material choices are inextricably bound up with matters of the spirit. Every time we gather at the Lord’s table we enact this reality. It is real bread that we receive, yet in our eating we become the bread that we eat—the body of Christ, blessed and broken for all.
•Dish it Up. The employees of Windows on the World restaurant, which was destroyed in the Sept.
Rite Lite Ltd., purveyor of “quality Judaica since 1949,” is helping children get comfortable with the mystery of a creator God who destroys. How? Rite Lite offers sets of Passover Ten Plagues Finger Puppets, made with cute cartoon eyes and colorful high-quality felt, so people of faith can share with children the suffering, death, and judgment poured out on Egyptians before the Exodus. All 10 plagues are represented, including lice, locusts, and (our favorite!) boils. (Personally, we’re hoping for a Sodom and Gomorrah line next.)
In these high-tech days, anyone could just copy the Bible onto any old USB memory stick, but that would be wrong wouldn’t it?
Having witnessed the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, it may be hard to imagine anything comforting about a whirlwind. They remind us that we are small and fragile.
In Kashmir, Niger, Honduras, and parts of every U.S. city, the situation is urgent. Thankfully, so is God’s persistent love.