"We declare to you what was from the beginning... concerning the word of life." These words penned by "The Elder" in the prologue of 1 John set the stage for a letter addressing a maturing Christian community, inspiring them to faithfulness and fellowship in Christ, who is eternal life.
Jesus' parable about a man who had two sons is one of the most famous and familiar stories in Western literature. Where do we find ourselves in it?
For a lot of people, June is lost and found season—the time when schools and clubs and teams and choirs set out all the things kids have lost over the past year and try to return them to their owners. In Luke 15, Jesus tells three stories about lostness and foundness, challenging us to rethink the very concepts themselves.
Karyn Nancarvis, a chaplain at Garden Spot Village, reflects on the significance of God's faithfulness over time.
Our culture's command to "never forget" carries a sense of fraught, almost religious, obligation, as if salvation is found in memory alone. How do followers of Jesus respond, particularly when this fixation on the past seems to drive future conflict, violence, and suffering?
Jesus' response to a violent and untruthful world is to send His followers out like sheep in the midst of wolves, inviting them to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. How do we live in this paradox in the midst of our culture's epistemic crisis?
Some of the very same leaders who were so adamant in their defense of the idea of "absolute truth" a few decades ago seem to now quite comfortably embrace "alternative facts." How do followers of Jesus see to it that no one takes us captive through philosophy, but that we allow the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth?
Is it fair to say that humanity is facing a knowledge crisis (or "epistemic crisis") today? A range of books and articles are exploring the question from contemporary perspectives, but what can followers of Jesus learn by engaging the wisdom of Scripture?
Why do Christians seem to be overrepresented in cult-like movements and conspiratorial thinking? As people who follow Jesus, how do we orient ourselves toward Jesus' truth?
About 2/3 of the Psalms could be categorized as lament—pleas for God to rescue or questions in the aftermath of catastrophe. When we experience grief, we often wonder why God doesn't answer us... but maybe that's because we haven't heard God calling out to us through Jesus.
Many of us carry around a linear model of grief, where we seamlessly progress from one stage to the next (from denial to anger to bargaining to depression and finally acceptance). But grief doesn't usually work that way. Instead, it's a liminal experience. When we're in the in-between of grief, there are a few dangers to watch out for.
Jesus' temptation in the wilderness is almost the definition of a "liminal" experience: He enters as a seemingly unassuming carpenter but emerges as God's anointed one. What happens in the in-between?
The early church continually made an audacious claim: that Jesus of Nazareth, a carpenter executed on a Roman cross, was presently ruling and reigning over the entire cosmos. Does this declaration that "Jesus is Lord" have any meaning for us today?
What do we do we find ourselves in a season of disorientation, between what was and what will be?
The Eucharist (or communion) is a central act that both creates and recognizes the Body of Christ. How do we discern Christ's body as we partake of it?
One of the ways the church recognizes the communal nature of our existence is through membership. But membership in the modern era sometimes seems far removed from the New Testament pattern. How do we live faithfully in that gap?
What makes you... you? The dominant cultural understanding (at least in the West) is that our essential self is located deep within us. The Biblical understanding, though, is that we were created by, in, and for relationship. In the words of South African leader Desmond Tutu, "A person is a person through other persons."
Christians throughout history have recognized that God must deal with Sin in an ultimate and final sense... but what does that look like? And does it matter?
If the idea of "sin" pops up in unexpected places, maybe it's worth stepping back and asking... what do we mean when we talk about "sin"?
From Friedrich Nietzsche to Fatboy Slim, the cultural understandings of "guilt" and "sin" have followed an unexpected trajectory—and the Christian story offers hope in surprising ways.