Even the Devils Believe

Dwight asks about the books that have been formative for us in our faith journey. He points to some really good ones (and some geeky ones that only an expert in early 20th century liberal Protestantism would read!).
I mentioned a few in this response to Daisy’s question about Roman Catholic writers in a post [...]

It turns out the bishop’s cats have decided to put me on trial for heresy because I posted some dog pictures during Friday cat blogging last week.
Your prayers are appreciated during this trying time!

I was trying to think how I might respond to this disheartening NYT article about the discrimination faced by atheist soldiers in the American military:
When Specialist Jeremy Hall held a meeting last July for atheists and freethinkers at Camp Speicher in Iraq, he was excited, he said, to see an officer attending.
But minutes into the [...]

A good friend of ours just adopted a puppy, a boxer mix, from the local animal rescue group. They’ve been looking forward to adopting a dog for months now, so everyone’s excited about her coming home. I thought I’d offer a few photos of her this Friday:

Her name is Moti, and so far [...]

The New York Times is running a long article detailing the campaign against non-Orthodox churches throughout Russia. Things have been difficult for Protestants and Catholics in Russia for some time, but recently they’ve gotten much, much worse:
Here in Stary Oskol, 300 miles south of Moscow, the police evicted a Seventh-day Adventist congregation from its [...]

I just finished reading Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic work, Moral Man & Immoral Society. I’m not quite sure how to react to it, though I’ve relied on some of Niebuhr’s insights fairly heavily over the years. More than anything, Niebuhr tries in this book to problematize the quest for perfect justice within any political [...]

As I mentioned on Monday, there is audio of my sermon from Sunday morning — it has just been posted on the St Joe’s website. Click on that link, then scroll down to the sermon archive. The files are in MP3 format, and my homily, true to form, is fairly short.

Jane Redmont and Deirdre Good have written a moving farewell piece to their mentor, Swedish Lutheran bishop and Harvard Div School dean emeritus Krister Stendahl. I won’t even excerpt it — you should read the whole thing.
As I’ve been reading some of Stendahl’s work in the week since he died, prompted by Jane’s posts on [...]

Much is being made in the blogosphere of Pope Benedict’s comments at an ecumenical prayer service in New York a few days ago:
At a Roman Catholic church in Manhattan, the pope later warned other Christian leaders against “so-called prophetic actions” that conflict with traditional views of the Bible, a reference to the debate over Scripture [...]

Last week was fairly crazy — I was in six states in four days and finalized our housing. On top of it, I preached at a nearby TEC parish on Sunday. It was nice to have the opportunity, though, and yesterday’s homily capped off a couple months of fairly intense focus on [...]