Pastor’s Life Newsletter

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...

Peter Leithart begins his recent book Gratitude: An Intellectual History with an illustration: "Imagine that your beloved grandmother gave you a rather ugly soup tureen as a wedding gift. Seeing as you have no use for the tureen, how ought you respond?...

TAKE AND READ: CONVERSATIONS WITH POPPI ABOUT GOD REVIEWED BY JOE SMALL ~ Robert W. Jenson and Solveig Lucia Gold, Conversations with Poppi about God. Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2006. Christian educator David Ng did not approve of "children’s sermons," but if...

Provocative insights on religious themes from contemporary novelists … On Truth "He told me – these are his words – ‘They were all slaves to what they could see.’ But there was a truth behind that they couldn’t see for...

Karl Barth is known to most of us by his Church Dogmatics, four volumes in 13 books, taking up two feet of shelf space! Other, smaller books and journal articles add to his oeuvre. The sum of all is the most...

  Suggestion for December reading: Bruce Gordon, John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2016. Princeton University Press is publishing an imaginative series: "Lives of Great Religious Books." Each book in the series is a...

October 31, 2017, marked 500 years since Martin Luther published his 95 theses disputing the practice of selling indulgences as a substitute for true repentance. This action by an obscure monk in a remote town in Germany helped ignite the...

  By Joe Small The 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation has come and gone. Well, not really. The 500th anniversary of the genesis of the Reformation has come and gone. What followed was Zurich in 1523, Geneva in 1536,...

Provocative insights on religious themes from contemporary novelists… On Hell: They slept under a tree near the overpass, side by side on top of August’s plastic sheet. Kirsten slept peacefully, aware each time she woke of the emptiness of the landscape,...