The Eagle & Child

So I have some ideas for posts here.  In fact, I’m going to note them here before I forget them: something about calling (the vocational kind) and daydreaming something about the difference between following Jesus and following the teachings of Jesus and is one, technically,  ”Christianity” and the other not something about “home” several brilliant [...]

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In the Koran, Allah asks, “The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made them in jest?” It’s a good question….Pascal uses a nice term to describe the notion of the creator’s, once having called forth the universe, turning his back to it: Deus Absconditus. Is this what we think happened?…”God [...]

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I’m reading Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief again. Last summer I read his collected short stories, some of them while sitting in an Adirondack  chair on the west coast of Vancouver Island overlooking the Pacific Ocean. The weather wasn’t great those couple of days on the ocean, but it was perfect for the melancholic nostalgia of MacLeod’s [...]

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I don’t know why I bother posting reading lists. I don’t remember ever following a reading list beyond maybe two books. It’s fun to discuss what I want to or should read, but I should never presume to set it in stone. One of the joys of owning books is perusing them over a time [...]

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I’ve been meaning to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together for a couple of years. Once again, my book purchasing anticipated my course syllabus: I was required to read it this semester.  It’s a great book–one which will be worth reading over and over again over the years.  For some reason–probably because it strikes a current [...]

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Here’s what I’d like to read this summer.  I say “like” because I don’t want to be legalistic about it.  And, let’s face it, the list will change by the time school’s over in June. The New Testament and the People of God by N.T. Wright The Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard [...]

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I handed in a paper today, one which has been looming over my semester, bogging me down, for several weeks now. Contrary to what I had expected, the “loominosity” hasn’t lifted.  This might be because the paper was fairly open-ended, so I had to set boundaries to it which seemed somewhat arbitrary to me.  It [...]

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The experiential reality of perceiving God is unfamiliar territory today.  The pace and preoccupation of urbanized, mechanized, collectivized, secularized modern life are such that any sort of inner life…is very hard to maintain…And if you attempt it, you will certain seem eccentric to your peers, for nowadays involvement in a stream of activities is decidedly [...]

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From Girl Meets God: I have written [in my prayer book] this, from Diana Eck’s Encountering God: The Latin credo means literally “I give my heart.”  The word believe is a problematic one today, in part because it has gradually changed its meaning from being the language of certainty so deep that I could give [...]

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(according to Lauren Winner) What you need for this sacrament [communion] is simple: just some bread and some wine, or grape juice. Grape juice became popular in the late nineteenth century, when temperance-advocating evangelicals realized they couldn’t call for a complete ban on potables if they were imbibing themselves at the altar on Sunday. They [...]

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