Venturing Our Selves
Comment, Summer 2022 It seems to me that we need strong language to account for friendship’s fragile yet sacred value. Friendship is the sort of love that, on the very…
Consoling the Heart
Fare Forward, Issue 11 It may sound like I’m trying to smuggle classical conceptions of rationality into contemporary notions of emotional awareness: Brené Brown cloaked under Aristotelian virtue ethics or…
The Problem with À La Carte Politics
Christianity Today, March 2021 A few months before the 1996 election, a stack of voting guides showed up at my nondenominational church in suburban Chicago. The guides contained candidates’ headshots…
Monuments Can Be Destroyed, but Not Forgotten
Christianity Today Online, September 2020 In the Hebrew Scriptures, stone monuments are earthen witnesses to a sacred covenant. When Jacob contractually maneuvered himself out from under his father-in-law Laban, he…
Sermon: A Friend Regained
Candlelight Evening Prayer, Valparaiso University, February 9, 2020 John 21:1-19 Good evening. Thank you for having me here at this beautiful Candlelight service. I wasn’t given a specific lectionary text…
Vespers Reflection
Jointly held by the Fellowship for Protestant Ethics and New Wine New Wineskins In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town in Galilee called…
A Regimen of Grace
Comment, Winter 2018 It is the dispersal of shadows, the rending of sacred curtains, the unburdening of consciences, and the liberation of captives that typifies Calvin at his best. For…
Resisting the Devil’s Instruments: Early Modern Resistance Theory for Late Modern Times
Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 38:1 (2018) In the midst of religious conflict in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a number of prominent Protestant theologians and…