Biblical · Reformed · Evangelical · Thought-Provoking
Nixon learned the limits of video calling during a long-distance courtship: the format is a poor substitute for actually being together. She brings that lesson to bear on the COVID-era church, where Zoom worship and live-streamed sacraments couldn't fill the space the gathered body of Christ left behind.
Earl Palmer has been called the best expository preacher in America of his generation. Burnett interviews him at age eighty-five about how he came to faith at Cal Berkeley, what shaped his approach to the text, and what he wants the next generation of preachers to keep alive.
War is hell, but coming home is its own hell. Tietje, a chaplain to combat veterans, listens to soldiers without a narrative for what they've lived, and finds in Holy Saturday the strange grace that the gospel has already descended into the hell of being lost.
The Christmas story turns on small things: an old couple visited by an angel, a young woman of little standing, a manger. Gatewood follows that pattern as a calling for the church: to love the small, since this is precisely how the Mighty One came to be among us.
Peterson watches rock climbers on a vertical 2,000-foot face and notices what looks reckless is actually patient: every move tested, ropes secure, basics never forgotten. He turns the image into a question for the Christian life: how often do we mistake competent ascent for spectacle?
Lewis wrote A Grief Observed after losing Joy Davidman to cancer in 1960. Barnes reads Lewis through his own grief after his wife Lorie's death in 2016, and finds something neither sentimental nor stoic: an honest path through the territory grief actually traverses.
SufferingDeath blows the empty clichés out of pastoral ministry like an umbrella in a hurricane. McSween focuses on the funeral service and sermon as the place where a Reformed pastor has a unique Word to proclaim, and where the gospel is most acutely needed and most easily mishandled.
Gibbons grew up Catholic in Scotland, considered the priesthood as a teenager, and never imagined he would one day preach at the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt where Luther had taken his vows. The piece is a personal Reformation memoir written from inside the surprise.
Ray picks up Julian of Norwich's Showings, reads it again, and finds soteriology buried in the oddities of her sentences. The piece is about what happens when a theological text actually does its work: the reader walks under an electric arch into a different world.
DiscipleshipHylton encouraged his congregation to mark the Reformation's 500th anniversary, then noticed that the popular media coverage focused mostly on Luther's failings. He pulls three pastoral insights from Luther's example, the kind that hold up regardless of what we think of his weaker moments.
A tomato plant's tag promised that 'deep roots produce abundant fruits,' which Hurley took as a parable of Reformation heritage. The piece is a pastor's reflection on how five-century-old roots actually feed the present, and what fruits a Reformed congregation might still expect to see.
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.
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