Churches, never waste a (coronavirus) crisis
During the coronavirus crisis, churches must resist the urge to make panicked decisions, and instead prayerfully and faithfully lead others through new challenges.
Celebrating Easter in a Good Friday world
This Easter many Christians, perhaps most, will gather as the earliest Christians did—in homes. Unlike those early Christians, they will do so as individual families connected, if at all, through online platforms and streaming services. Like those who preceded them in the faith, they will break bread and praise God as the church has done through the ages—amid war, peace, famine, plenty, pandemic, plague, freedom, oppression.
Jesus Wasn’t Killed by the Jews: Reflections for Christians in Lent (Book review)
The Lenten season and Holy Week recall gospel lessons and other passages of Scripture appropriate to the season, yet we need to ask if we read these sacred texts of “Old” and “New” Testaments with awareness of the history that has unfolded over the past two millennia.
“The Lord is the stronghold of my life”—a meditation on Psalm 27 amid the COVID-19 pandemic
Though far removed from us in time, a shepherd boy destined to be king, struggled with fears as terrible as our own while he hid from the peril of death at the hands of Saul's soldiers. Perhaps it was in the darkness of a cave where he had fled, breathless with fear as armed men closed in upon him, that Psalm 27 began to form in his heart, “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?"
Living between trapezes—waiting out the coronavirus pandemic
We are waiting. We are in uncharted territory, our entire planet trapped between ordinary life and sheltering in place because of the coronavirus. It feels like we are living between trapezes. Having let go the secure bar of the first trapeze, we hang in mid-air, awaiting the arrival of the next. The next bar is not in sight.