As part of the release of The Foolishness of God, we are running a series of articles by J. Brandon Meeks. The Old Testament is dying. Or so says Brent Strawn.[1] I tend to agree with his diagnosis. In many of our parishes, it is already time for a toe-tag. Someone said to me recently, “I…
I still remember the first time someone explained the Anglican view of Baptism to me. It was 12 years ago, and I was an Evangelical college student, listening to a lecture on the Reformation. Our instructor was Anglican, and as a part of his discussion, he explained the early Reformed view of Baptism. I don’t…
In American Christianity, including theologically conservative congregations across the United States, a formative part of Christian worship has become imbalanced over the last generation or two. Namely, the range of hymnody has skewed to songs composed in our own narrow cultural context of the past 20 years. This trend has sidelined hymnody that fosters musical…
The Second Part of the Homily of Fasting In the former Homily, beloved, was shewed, that, among the people of the Jews, fasting, as it was commanded them from God by Moses, was to abstain the whole day, from morrow till night, from meat, drink, and all manner of food that nourisheth the body; and…
Covid-19 has sent all of society into crisis mode, but the church has felt most acutely the effects of the pandemic. Worship services have been cancelled, hospital visitation curtailed or eliminated, and bible studies have been put on hiatus. Clergy, not knowing the right response, have sought to care for souls in the most readily…
An Homily of Good Works: And First of Fasting The life which we live in this world, good Christian people, is of the free benefit of God lent us, yet not to use it at our pleasure after our own fleshly will, but to trade over the same in those works which are beseeming them…
The streetlights flicker, set to hummingLike mosquitoes in the amber nightOf tree frogs and fireworks, unforked lightning,Spine-tickling rivulets of sweat. This is the stuff, I think, this the life I recall from my youth by the ocean, Days of marsh grass and the sun’s gold-leaf,Heinekens, Merits, the soulful motion Of lights across the bay. A couple thereSits…
William Tyndale: A Very Brief History. By Melvyn Bragg. London: SPCK (2017, 2019). 106 pp. $18.00 (hardcover). $12.00 (paper).[1] $6.99 (Kindle). William Tyndale gave us the English Bible and thereby also the English language as it has been read, written, and spoken since. Melvyn Bragg believes that Tyndale nonetheless is largely a forgotten man—his story,…
Homage to Frederick Buechner The thorn was bronze and wonderful to see,Though no one’s safe around such scimitars That escalade against the very sky. Yet scimitar by scimitar it rose,And being made so barbed and barbarous, Perhaps it meant no harm but harmed by chance. Woodcutters could have axed and hacked the treeTo toss a greenwood crackle…
An Excerpt from An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine There exists a growing trend in theological anthropology toward what has been called Christian materialism. By Christian materialism, I am referring to the position that we are strictly identical to our bodies—albeit sophisticated bodies, our brains, or our animal (i.e., a biological…
