To Ashes

I used to find the ashes creepy. Everyone in this church will die. Every old person, young person, baby, and flower in this church will die. (I think all our flowers are real.) As they come down the steps, I would imagine their funerals. What will be said? Where will it be? Will a lot […]

Giving Up

So, it’s that special day of the year set aside by the church for perfectionists to freak out about what else they ought to be doing, and start doing (or not doing) that thing like gangbusters for 40 days plus Sundays. They say “sacrifice” and they say “pay attention to what matters” or “do more […]

Hell Hath No Fury

Yesterday I walked into two conversations about Hell. First I was sitting eating my lunch in an empty classroom when a couple of students wandered in. I was doing my best to ignore them, but one was saying, “I have a King James translation and I just don’t understand it with all those wherefores and […]

Annotated Bibliography: Inevitable Crime, Gifts of the Mediocre, and Stepping up for Jesus

Since… there is a ‘law’ governing the amount of crime in a society, moral responsibility for crime must lie with society and not with the individual criminal. “It is society that prepares the crime and … the guilty person is only the instrument who executes it,” is the rather dramatic way he expressed it. People […]