For Jordan Monge For some time now I have wanted to do a second theological analysis of a piece of popular music; the religious thought of Top 40 musicians is so deep, and so little appreciated, that it seems incumbent on me to expose its hidden treasures to the public gaze. Today, I would like
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It’s not quite Advent yet, but a friend of mine saw Christmas lights being put up the other day, so I suppose that it’s not entirely out of place for me to discuss an Advent hymn this week. In any case, this particular hymn has been stuck in my head for most of the past
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On Tuesday night I went to an amazing lecture by John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York. He had been invited to Harvard to give the Noble Lectures at Memorial Church, and he spoke with amazing insight about “God’s Mission as Restorative Justice.” What is God’s justice really like? And what is the role of the
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I wish I had a quick, easy way to deal with fear. I wish that whenever I felt that inability to take a deep breath, that murky roiling of the stomach, that tightening of the shoulders I could do something—snap my fingers, maybe—to make everything better again. But life doesn’t work like that. My greatest
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If you’ve read my blog more than two or three times, you already know how delighted I am by religious literature, especially religious literature that I haven’t come across before. Nothing reminds me that Christianity isn’t just a twenty-first-century American phenomenon like discovering a piece of writing from another time or another culture that gives
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How long has it been since you’ve listened to any part of Handel’s Messiah? If you had to think about your answer at all, the correct response is probably ‘too long’. It is a marvelous piece of music in its own right, but even more moving for how it paints salvation history. The words are
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Recently I’ve been thinking quite a lot about unanswered prayer—you know, the perennial question of what to think of a God who says “Knock, and the door will be opened” and then seems to ignore us quite often when we ask things of him. There are all sorts of answers to that question which I
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