5/15/2019

3/12/2019

12/4/2018

The pastoral value of Ellen Charry’s book is signaled by her deeply personal introduction: “The gap between eschatological happiness and temporal happiness needs to be addressed because people experience hardship and grief that sets them off balance, and they wonder whether they can ever be happy again in this life, or whether life amounts to no more than a vale of tears simply to be slogged through somehow in hopes of a heavenly reward.”

10/16/2018

The PC(USA) has recently added the Belhar Confession to our Book of Confessions, bringing the total number of creeds, confessions, and catechisms to a dozen. We still don’t know what to do with them, however. Are they a collection of what people in other times and places confessed, or are they central to what we are called to believe and do? Are they are smorgasbord from which we may choose the dishes that suit us, or are we to receive the whole witness of our tradition? Are they to be mined for a list of essential tenets, or are we called to make corporate judgments about what is fundamental and what is marginal?

9/18/2018

9/5/2018

Ezekiel was surrounded by the ‘likeness’ of 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 continue to eat what is offered to them, and continue to speak to the community of faith. From time to time, the Presbyterian Foundation will offer brief studies of Scripture that may be useful to pastors in teaching and preaching God’s word.

8/21/2018

How many English translations of the Bible do we need? New translations appear at a dizzying pace, each one promising superior accuracy and readability. The profusion of translations is evidence that they will all sell at a brisk pace – publishers publish what they think people will buy.

8/7/2018

Fall reading selection: Future of Mainline Protestantism

7/24/2018

Some sermons are like easy listening music on the FM dial – smooth, comforting, in one ear and out the other. Other sermons are unsettling – more like a challenging piece from a contemporary composer on the classical music station. Michael Eric Dyson’s sermon is not easy listening; like modern symphonic music it is bold, taxing, thought-provoking.

7/10/2018

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 and made use of better Greek manuscripts. The RSV was itself revised 40 years later as The New Revised Standard Version – NRSV. But, in addition to KJV, RSV, and NRSV, we now have the NIV, TNIV, ESV, NEB, REB, TEV, CEB, JB, NJB, NKJV, and more, in addition to paraphrases such as J.B. Phillips, the Living Bible, and The Message.

6/29/2018

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 the Lord; the one seeks glory from men, the other finds its highest glory in God, the Witness of our conscience. The one lifts up its head in its own glory; the other says to its God, “Thou art my glory, and the lifter up of mine head.” (XIV,28)

5/15/2018

George Marsden has not written a biography of a person, but the life of a book. His biography of Mere Christianity is one of a series, “Lives of Great Religious Books” published by Princeton University Press. Included in the series are “biographies” of Augustine’s Confessions, Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, Calvin’s Institutes, and Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, as well as other religious classics.