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The First Letter of John is something of a mystery. Despite its name, the author never identifies himself, and unlike most New Testament letters, it has neither an opening greeting nor a named recipient. Early Christian tradition attributed it to John the apostle. Most modern scholars are less certain, though its language and theology closely resemble the Gospel of John.…

One of the easiest ways to misunderstand God’s unconditional love is to imagine that it means nothing really matters. If God loves everyone no matter what, does that mean wrongdoing simply gets waved away? No! Unconditional love does not mean pretending harm did not happen or calling injustice acceptable. It does not mean that trust must be restored immediately, that…

Most of us know what it feels like to be at rock bottom: a decision we made led to calamity, a relationship we cherished unraveled, a season of life we’re going through feels like it is closing in on every side. In times like those, it may help to remember that Jonah’s prayer in chapter two comes from literal rock…

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,…