On staff at Redeemer Church in Chicago. Loves sports, music, hilarious stuff, history, politics, his family, and Jesus.
I’ve been reading Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7 in the Bible) a lot lately, and I’ve also been reading what other people have written and said about it. There are a bunch of things about it that I hadn’t fully considered before. One of them is that it really isn’t common sense wisdom at…
Eugene Peterson’s translation/paraphrase of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount has been the most striking section of the Bible for me in the last few months. He finds these really compelling ways to express the voice of Jesus.
“It’s more important to be nice, I guess, than being wise.” — Julian Casablancas, “4 Chords of the Apocalypse”
I’ve always liked that line, partly because of the mind-bending/mind-torturing sentence…
There’s a (possibly apocryphal) saying attributed to Martin Luther, a Christian theologian from the 1500s. He supposedly said something like, “If I knew the world would end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.” There’s a Jewish saying that’s similar: “If you have a sapling in your hand and they tell you that…
This was originally written for a congregational newsletter.
I imagine that I’m not alone in questioning whether the supposed great blessing of living in a democracy is worth the soul-wearying experience of campaign season (which is a…