A Chesterton Quote Impossible to Remember That quote is eight lines out of a 55 line paragraph in Chesterton’s book. Apparently Mr. Chesterton was never at a loss for words. Well, what’s my point? For about three months, I have been choosing a few lines meaningful to me from Chesterton’s book and copying them into […]
It was the fall of 1990, and I was in a new member class led by Pastor Saresky at Faith Lutheran Church (Missouri Synod) in Penfield, NY. He was discussing Communion, The Lord’s Supper, Eucharist, the celebration of that Last Supper Jesus celebrated in the Upper Room with his closest followers and commanded that they […]
Matthew 24:23 – Then if anyone says to you, ‘Look! Here is the Messiah!’ or ‘There he is!’– do not believe it. James 2:19 – You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe– and shudder. John 3:16 – For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten […]
In a Sunday morning class, we were watching a Fr. Robert Barron video in which he talked about the modern tendency to trivialize Jesus as a very smart and very nice guy with a good philosophy of life and lots of interesting stories. The fact is, he said, that Jesus was an unusual and disturbing […]
In the last few weeks I have read “Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters,” by theologian and scholar N. T. Wright, “Killing Jesus” by Commentator Bill O’Reilly and historian Martin Dugard, and a short reflection on the tenth day of Lent, “Why Was the Cross […]
Revised, with apologies, December 17th, 2013. The Experience of God by Eastern Orthodox theologian and philosopher David Bentley Hart is a critique of both the faulty logic of modern atheists and of the easy targets provided them by simplistic understandings and explanations of God by people of faith. To whet your appetite for Hart’s books, […]
I first read this 688 page document, paying particular attention to the scripture references, while I was a student at Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary eight or ten years ago. It is great educational and devotional reading for any Christian, Catholic or not, if taken in fifteen or twenty page bite size pieces at a time. […]
Listening to yesterday’s Gospel reading from Luke 10 about Jesus sending the Seventy out and instructing them to “rejoice in one thing only,” I was reminded that it was the text for the one and only prepared sermon I ever delivered. Near the end of my three years of Lutheran seminary, I took Professor Tom […]
Below is a short paper I wrote in May, 2002, to fulfill a requirement for a Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary course, Introduction to Theology. The professor was Dr. David Yeago, prominent Lutheran theologian, who was always challenging us to do a better job of “unpacking” the texts we were studying or quoting and who must […]
Listening to the Gospel reading this morning from Mark 10 about the young man who went away sad after Jesus told him to sell everything he had and give to the poor inspired some reflection on the difficulties we have understanding scripture and formulating a cohesive theology from it. A couple of things I learned […]