Herbert's most famous poem stages a soul drawing back from divine love and the patient persistence with which Love draws it forward anyway. McDonald reads the poem alongside Herbert's pastoral writings, finding the same Reformed conviction running through both: only refusal can shut us out.
Burnett opens Ephesians 1 and finds Paul piling blessing on blessing: chosen before the foundation of the world, predestined in love, sealed for an inheritance. The piece sits with the dizzying generosity of Paul's grammar and asks what it means that our calling is grounded that deep.
Why come to Jesus rather than to the certified teachers of the law? Bartow preaches Matthew 11's invitation to take Christ's yoke as the answer to a question Israel had been asking for generations: where, exactly, do we go to find rest for our souls?
Pastors run spiritual formation programs without often pausing to ask what 'spirit' actually means. Vanhoozer treats that question as a load-bearing one for ministry: what we think the human spirit is shapes everything we do to form it. He follows the biblical words to a working answer.
TheologyWhat does humility have to do with teaching the Bible? Bryant argues: everything. The breadth and mystery of Scripture, the humility of God's self-revelation in Christ, and the limits of every interpreter all push against confident overreach in the classroom and the pulpit alike.
Canlis returned to America after seventeen years abroad and was struck by how aggressively the culture sells 'best,' 'biggest,' 'greatest.' Reading Paul through Eugene Peterson, she argues for a theology of the ordinary that finds the work of God in walking-around life.
Ephesians 2 says Christ has broken down the dividing wall of hostility, in the present perfect tense: it was done, and it remains done. Goodloe asks why the church so often acts as if the work were still pending, and what it means to live as those for whom reconciliation is already accomplished.
October 31, 1517: Luther nails ninety-five theological challenges to a church door in Wittenberg, and the world soon catches fire. Dawson tells the story of the question that haunted Luther for years before that morning, and the answer that, once found, set everything in motion.
October 31, 1517 was meant to be a scholarly debate among theologians at the University of Wittenberg. McGlasson works back into the local controversy over indulgences, finds an early version of the modern prosperity gospel, and argues the first thesis still says the load-bearing thing.
Bruce Metzger spent his career as one of America's foremost biblical scholars but began as a Sunday School superintendent. These late-career reflections on what he would do if he had a classroom again are practical, simple, and clear-eyed about what religious instruction is actually for.
Proverbs uses contrast to teach: life or death, wisdom or folly, no comfortable middle. Hering brings the Proverbs' grammar of formation to bear on the painful experience of catechized children who walk away anyway, and finds the tradition has more to say than parents often imagine.
TheologyA Reformation Day sermon on Ephesians 2:8-9 that opens with the surprisingly theological politics of tipping. McKechnie uses the everyday transaction to set up the very different logic of grace, and Luther's recovery of it after centuries of religious tipping had buried the gospel.
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