Tag: Peace

  • Week 17: The affections of Christ and JOY

    Some thoughts from NT Wright regarding the end of Matthew 6: Has it ever struck you what a basically happy person Jesus was?

  • Week 16: The affections of Christ clash with my desire to retaliate

    I have been drawn back into the Sermon on the Mount. Reading it, I hear the voice of Dallas Willard. It takes me a long time to move through the Sermon anymore because I feel like when it’s over I quit hearing Dallas as much.

  • Contrasting views on hatred and hell

    I came across a post from a Christian nationalist and then a thought from Thomas Merton in New Seeds of Contemplation.

  • How to train pastors

    I am fairly locked into the life of Bonhoeffer right now. I am working through a book, Bonhoeffer the Assassin? by Nation, Siegrist, and Umbel. I read Marsh’s biography of Bonhoeffer and recently finished Life Together by Bonhoeffer. We need his example in this day for our cultural Christianity.

  • The healing place of Christmas

    Peter Wehner’s piece for Christmas is beautiful. Jesus came through a family full of brokenness and dysfunction. That is significant for each of us and will hopefully move us past the perfect postcard pictures we’re flooded with in this season.

  • Keeping calm in chaotic times

    We can — we must! — take responsibility for the way we live and work in our homes and neighborhoods, workplaces and public squares. We can refuse to permit the culture to dictate the way we go about our lives. More HERE.

  • Prayers as we vote

    A prayer against apathy God of empathy and compassion, we are grateful you do not sit idly by without concern for your people. In your deep love for us, you sent your only Son to walk among us, to know what it is to be human, and to suffer on our behalf. O Lord, as your humble servants, give us…

  • Be still

    The verse has always, in my mind, been focused on me. I realize I forget to read my own notes. He says, “Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.”  (Ps. 46:10, NIV)

  • Jesus and the Powers, Part 6

    It’s been a week without writing mainly because I’ve been absorbing the political shooting from last week and then seeing how it might play out in the Republican National Convention. Along with that was preparation for this coming week’s book study group on Jesus and the Powers. It’s been a week of absorbing and reflecting.

  • The call for the moral center to hold

    David French writes in the hours following an assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a political rally in Pennsylvania: Now is the time for America’s moral center to rise up and declare — with one voice, neither red nor blue — “Enough.” We either recover our sense of decency and basic respect for the humanity of our opponents, or we…