Pastor’s Life Newsletter

Ezekiel was surrounded by the ‘likeness’ of the glory of the LORD, and he heard ‘someone’ speaking: “eat what is offered to you; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel” (Ezekiel 1:28, 3:1). Each week, pastors...

Suggestion for September reading James Hudnut-Beumler & Mark Silk, eds. The Future of Mainline Protestantism in America. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018 In the Presbyterian year of “The Way Forward Commission,” “The All Agency Review Committee,” and “The 2020...

Suggestion for August reading: Michael Eric Dyson, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America. New York: St. Martin’s, 2017. Some sermons are like easy listening music on the FM dial – smooth, comforting, in one ear and out...

For centuries, American Protestants read the Authorized Version of the Bible (better known as the King James Version). In the mid-twentieth century a revision of the KJV appeared: The Revised Standard Version. The RSV changed Elizabethan language to contemporary English...

Augustine’s City of God is a tour de force, tracing the pilgrim City of God’s movement among the ungodly. Augustine examines the course of the two cities created by two loves. “The one, therefore, glories in itself, the other in...

Suggestion for June reading: George M. Marsden, C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. George Marsden has not written a biography of a person, but the life of a book. His biography of Mere Christianity is...

Provocative insights on religious themes from contemporary novelists… On Faith: People believe, thought Shadow. It’s what people do. They believe, and then they will not take responsibility for their beliefs; they conjure things, and do not trust their conjurations. People...

The sacraments have been referred to as “means of grace.” The term has fallen out of theological fashion because it is ambiguous and open to misunderstanding. Are Baptism and Eucharist instruments of grace? vehicles of grace? conveyors of grace? elicitors...

Suggestion for April reading: Petra Bosse-Huber, et al, eds. Reformation: Legacy and Future. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2015. The 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation has come and gone, with little fanfare and minimal observance. It is worth noting that 2017...

On Possessions: On these wheelchair tours of his apartment what he was feeling was stingingly apparent: What will happen to all this when I am gone? There’s nothing I can take with me into the grave. These beautiful objects which...