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 Augustinian moral psychology. Perhaps I am doing some smuggling. But I do think that wisdom applied to action trains our unformed and unruly desires. It invites us […]
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 and positions on a series of hot-button political issues, including abortion, homosexuality, and congressional term limits. Our church was one of approximately 125,000 to receive […]
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 set up a pillar in the highlands of Gilead. It was supposed to be a reminder of a legal separation, but the fragility of the […]
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 to preach on, but was asked to find a passage that would help us reflect meaningfully on the future. So, against the grain, I chose […]
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 Nazareth, to a virgin engaged to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David. The virgin’s name was Mary. And he came […]
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 all his severity, and for all his moral blind spots, it is impossible to overlook these grace-filled pastoral elements of his work. Calvin, like the […]
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 lawyers wrote on the collective moral obligation to resist systemic injustice. My essay focuses on Johannes Althusius, who offers a theological account of the political […]