I remember visiting the Lincoln Memorial and being amazed by the Second Inaugural engraved on the North interior wall. Did the builders really know what it said? For a country that says it separates church and state, Lincoln provided perhaps the deepest theological reflection by any U.S. politician, and something far deeper than that of many theologians.
Continue reading “Lincoln’s Startling Conclusion”
Month: January 2018
The Human Story of a Man-Made Disaster
I remember driving in the south and southwest during the late 1950s and early 1960s on family vacations. We’d see rows and rows of tall, narrow trees (many probably being tower poplar) planted between fields. “Why did they do that?” I asked my parents. They were windbreaks, they told me, used to stop the soil from blowing away like it did in the great black, rainless storms of twenty-five years before.
Continue reading “The Human Story of a Man-Made Disaster”
A New Spiritual Classic
Centuries ago Brother Lawrence wrote the spiritual classic The Practice of the Presence of God. There that monk taught us to be aware that God is with us in each moment, even when performing such mundane tasks as working in the kitchen or cleaning a floor. In Liturgy of the Ordinary Tish Warren has provided us with such a classic for our day.
From
waking to brushing teeth to making phone calls to getting into an argument to going to sleep at night, she opens to us how we live each moment in God’s presence. These gifts of repeated patterns or recurring events in our lives offer us the opportunity to see God’s grace in each moment and give thanks for his gifts when life is hard and when it is good.
spirit this book creates is wise, warm, encouraging and at the same time very honest. It is neither sugarcoated nor moralistic. We don’t find do’s and don’ts. Rather, in this Christianity Today Book of the Year, we find a winsome invitation to join our day to God’s.
While the book uses the motif of liturgy to frame the book, readers certainly don’t need to come from or be familiar with the liturgical tradition to benefit from this. Instead it provides fresh dimensions for and expands our appreciation of Immanuel, God with us.