Recently I had two lovely conversations.The first was with Octavio and Claire, who work at Regent College, Vancouver. Regent College is a Christian liberal arts college, where for many years I have given a talk as a guest lecturer each...
Anyone wandering about near a freezing cold pond one night near the city of Sebaste in the year 320 would have seen an astounding sight: forty Roman soldiers, all members of the so-called “Thundering Legion”, were standing together naked...
Recently I read an interesting critique of American Christianity. It pointed out that in an earlier day the schoolrooms for our children used to feature the Ten Commandments written on the wall, rather than (for example) the Beatitudes....
I have just finished watching the series finale of a wonderful television show called The Good Place, starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson. It features the fellowship and adventures of a few people who die and end up in hell, but who are...
t is not unusual these days to find that unbelievers like Richard Dawkins are very angry. In his The God Delusion he denounces the God of the Old Testament as “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction”, and among the many...
In 1992, a spotlight was left too close to a curtain in Windsor Castle in England, and the heat from that spotlight caused the curtain to catch fire. Before the fire was extinguished, much of the eleventh century castle built originally...
February 3 is the post-feast of the Feast of the Meeting, which latter is celebrated on February 2, this being forty days after Christmas. The Feast of the Meeting commemorates the time when Simeon and Anna met Christ in the Temple after...
I suspect that every pastor has been asked this question at one time or another, and it usually comes from one of the more junior members of the congregation who has just lost his beloved cat or dog. (The loss of goldfish seems not to...
I sometimes find that it is very depressing not to live under a rock. If I lived under a rock, I would not know how bad things are progressing in the western world, but as it is, with newspapers, Facebook, and the six o’clock news, one...
For most English speaking people in our culture, the Lord’s Prayer ends with the words, “For Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.” This is, however, an ecclesiastical and liturgical conclusion, not a part of...
The next petition in the Lord’s Prayer is, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil”. These two conjoined sentences should be considered as a single petition in Hebrew poetic parallelism, like the earlier petition, “Thy...
We come now in our series on the Lord’s Prayer to the petition, “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”. This rendering could perhaps use a little help. It might be more accurately and literally rendered,...
We continue with our examination of the Lord’s Prayer, and come now to the petition, “Give us today our daily bread”. One might be tempted to wonder what one could say about this petition by way of elaboration or explanation, since it...
We continue with our examination of the Lord’s Prayer, and come now to the petition “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. It seems clear that these words constitute a single petition expressed with Hebrew...
We continue in this series with our examination of the Lord’s Prayer phrase by phrase, using Matthew’s version of the Prayer. We turn now to the next petition: “Hallowed be Thy Name”. To understand this petition we must first understand...
