Dear ______: Thanks for sharing your thoughts on my recent letter about making friends with John Calvin. I think you drew some conclusions that I wasn’t intending. Let me take a step back. As a person in ministry, you need a lot of different kinds of friends — and seminary is a great place to […]
Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall: Heidelberg Catechism and the Law of God
You see someone looking in the mirror. Looking. Looking. What is he thinking? Better still, what are you thinking? Too much attention to his reflection — easy to suppose he likes what he sees. We mock the self-absorption of mythical Narcissus, falling in love with his reflection in a pond. But we also fear what […]
Meat and Potatoes for the Soul?
“Do I really need to pray?” I’ve heard the question often enough. It is easy to get stuck in puzzles and paradoxes on the topic, even if we know in our hearts and our guts that we need to pray: If God knows what I need, and loves me too, why do I need to […]
On ‘the art of theological reflection’
When trying to make good use of writings that stand at a great distance from us–whether because they come from long ago or from across the boundaries of cultures, we need some guidelines, some sense of how we might go about it. We pick up a patristic theologian, say John Chrysostom, and find his style […]