Rev. Tom Hathaway

The word vocation comes from the Latin vocare, to call. It implies that somewhere behind the work, there is a caller and that the work of a life is less about constructing a path than discovering one. A job is work you do for pay. A career is a path you build through ambition and accumulation. But a vocation is…

You have heard it said (perhaps even from a pulpit): Happiness is fleeting and circumstantial, a product of what happens to you. Joy, by contrast, is deep, lasting, and rooted in God. One is human. The other is divine. It’s a nice, tidy distinction. However, it’s also one the Bible itself never actually makes. The Hebrew and Greek words translated…

Anger gets a bad reputation in religious circles. But the Bible is not squeamish about it. God gets angry. Jesus gets angry. The Psalms are full of it. Anger, in the biblical tradition, is not a moral failure. It’s a moral signal, or what one theologian calls “active displeasure toward something important enough to care about.” So when you’re angry,…

Lament is one of the least practiced but most biblical forms of prayer. Lament is not complaint per se. It’s not despair per se. Rather, it’s the act of bringing raw grief, confusion, and anger directly to God rather than packaging it into something more presentable. And the Psalms are full of it – nearly a third of them are…

Legend has it that Shakespeare had a hand in the King James Bible’s translation of Psalm 46. The King James Bible took the better part of seven years to create, worked on by six teams of scholars poring over Hebrew and Greek texts alongside earlier English Bibles. While that work was underway, Shakespeare was alive and working right there in…

Psychologist Dacher Keltner has spent years studying what happens to us in the presence of something vast: a night sky, a grove of towering trees, a waterfall. He calls it the “small self.” Awe, it turns out, shrinks our sense of importance, how central we feel to the story. And that shrinking, strangely, makes us better people. It softens the…

Luke tells us that the town of Emmaus was seven miles from Jerusalem. What he does not tell us is in what direction. Nearly two thousand years later, archaeologists and historians still disagree. There are several candidate sites: Emmaus Nicopolis, a significant Roman town, sits about twenty miles from Jerusalem, which is too far to match Luke’s account. Abu Ghosh,…

Pontius Pilate was the Roman prefect of Judea. Prefects in the provinces operated under considerable pressure. Their job was to keep order, collect taxes, and prevent uprisings. A riot or rebellion on their watch was a career-ending and sometimes life-ending event. Public sentencing in the Roman world was a civic spectacle, conducted before a crowd with a genuine stake in…

Some biblical words show up all over the place: love, justice, mercy. But others appear only once or twice, leaving translators and theologians scratching their heads. Take ephod. Usually, it means a priestly garment. But in the story of Gideon, it becomes something else entirely. Was it a statue? An idol? Some kind of sacred bling? We are not told.…

Esther is one of the most unusual books in the Bible. It reads less like scripture and more like a Persian court thriller: palace intrigue, a hidden identity, a genocidal villain, and a last-minute reversal that saves an entire people. It is also one of only two books in the Bible that never mentions God by name. And yet the…