“Our father in heaven” doesn’t quite mean what you think.
Doing Our Part
How we invest the gifts God gives us really does matter.
Standing Stones and Christmas Trees
Some people have rejected Christmas and Easter because of their origins. But the examples of the standing stone and bronze serpent shed light on whether a practice is “pagan” in God’s eyes.
How Could She Miss the Pool of Siloam?
The famous pool lay undiscovered because of the properties of living water.
A Precious Goblet
A rabbinic parable explains how God balances mercy with justice.
The Flood: From Baby’s Room to Philosopher’s Den
Many of us miss the fact the flood story gives a profound answer to one of the most difficult questions posed by philosophers today: how a good God can tolerate human evil in the world.
Hebraic Thinking is that of an Oral Culture
In Walter Ong’s classic book Orality and Literacy, he shares a fascinating theory about why our modern Western culture thinks so differently than the way the Bible does. Eastern thinking, like what you find in the Old Testament, is very concrete and image-oriented, and it uses stories and parables to explain rather than abstract logic. […]
Not Yours to Complete
How Jewish ethics deals with smoking can teach us about following Christ.
Those who have much will be given more
For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. (Matthew 25:29) I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard a sermon based on this tough saying of Jesus. The line comes up several places. We find it after the […]
Can we call Jesus “Rabbi”?
Is it appropriate to call Jesus “rabbi”? Or did he reject the title? A look at how the word was used in the first century.