Who is My Neighbor? Join us for this Lenten Reflection Series.

Paul has been causing all kinds of trouble in Jerusalem and the Roman tribune has had enough, so he sends Paul to Felix, the governor. In responding to this rumor of forty Jews lying in ambush to assassinate Paul, the tribune puts together a force more than ten times...

Peaches are my favorite fruit. When my husband and I had been married about ten years, we took a trip together. When we got to our guest casita at a New Mexico hot springs, we began to unload the car. I handed him a peach that we had bought at a roadside stand,...

Sunsets in the desert can be spectacular. The sun emits colors across the spectrum; the different wavelengths of those colors make the sky appear blue during the day. As the sun sets, warmer shades of gold, orange, and red fill the horizon. The particular kind of...

Just after college, I spent two years teaching English in Seoul, South Korea. While I had traveled abroad, this was my first time to live overseas. One important thing I learned was not to take my US citizenship for granted. The privileges and power it provided were...

We don’t know much about many of the Old Testament prophets. Scripture doesn’t detail Hosea’s background and Elijah doesn’t even have a job, much less a backstory. Amos apparently tended trees and flocks before being called to preach God’s message to the powerful;...

From the Archives: April 7, 1954If, in the face of religious doubts and difficulties, we yield to the temptation to abandon what faith we have, what we are really saying is, “If I can’t understand everything, I won’t try to understand anything. If I....(View this...

What I love most about studying scripture is that they teach through narrative. There is no directive that stands untroubled or unquestioned. The commands of the Old Testament are reinterpreted through the New Testament.The red-letter words of Jesus cross each other...

The word bless has many meanings depending on the subject that is blessing and the object that is being blessed. Its most familiar form means to invoke or confer divine favor upon. This is what we mean when God blesses us or when a person (often clergy) blesses...

The “fishers of men” image is a powerful and familiar one. It can also be one that puts the power and the gain into the fisherman’s hands: the net, the boat, the meal, all things that clearly empower the fisherman over the fish. When this is translated in English as...

I can do a lot of things. But the will to do them can be harder to come by. I know how to work out, eat better, get organized, respond to emails, give frequent high-quality feedback. Sustaining the will to do things that are hard is…hard. Paul reminds us that the...