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Ordinary Peacemaking

The Advent season puts us in touch with our yearning for peace. Sometimes, when I think about peace, my mind goes global. I consider large-scale and long-boiling cauldrons of conflict. When I do, I often go numb, because there doesn’t seem to be much I can do to make...

Hope as Comfort and Protest, Mercy and Justice

Hope is always paradoxical. It offers tender comfort and stirs restless protest. It embraces those who suffer and insists that suffering will not have the last word. Theologian Jurgen Moltmann said that: “Hope finds in Christ not only a consolation in suffering, but...

A Fearful Courage

I wrote the following reflection as a guest post for Stan Dotson’s blog, “In Our Elements”: The cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz went searching for courage, and all of us, in anxious and fearful times, scramble to find it. Unlike the lion, though,...

Paradoxical Hope

Novelist John Hassler wrote about a conversation he witnessed between two aging novelists, Frederick Manfred and J.F. Powers. Manfred, at seventy-one, had just finished novel number twenty-five and knew what the next four were going to be about. Then, he intended to...

A Vastly Loving God

The title of J.B. Phillips classic book got it right: Your God is Too Small. He was right. Many of us have, sometimes without our knowing it, substituted a paltry and puny God for the great and gracious God made known in Jesus. We’ve manufactured a god from our fears...