The following is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Beautiful and Terrible Things: A Christian Struggle with Suffering, Grief, and Hope. My father died on Maundy Thursday 2019. As my mother and I sat by my father’s bed in the ICU, we began to talk about plans for his funeral—not […]
Mack
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Beautiful and Terrible Things: A Christian Struggle with Suffering, Grief, and Hope is out and available from the publisher and all the usual places where you buy words on pages (and words in pixels and spoken, the Kindle and audio versions are available too!). The description from the publisher: Bible […]
Proper 27 (32) (November 10, 2019) – Audio For he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all are alive. Amen. It is perhaps not so common now, but for centuries in the Christian world a common criticism leveled at someone was that they […]
It is perhaps fitting that first thing Friday morning, the First of November, All Saints’ Day, Editor Jessica sent me the final draft of Beautiful & Terrible Things. The book is written, edited, and now awaits copy editing, formatting, and marketing. Coming in at 164 pages and 51,800 words, I […]
An excerpt from my forthcoming book, Beautiful and Terrible Things. In the months following Mack’s death I would not say that I had a crisis of faith, but I certainly felt a general malaise. I was writing about Mack’s death and my faith in his/our resurrection, and at the same […]
This quote comes from Ecclesiastes which I have been working with (as I strive to finish my book by the August 1 deadline!). For the first time I noticed the rest of the verse. It is better to go to the house of mourningthan to go to the house of […]
Green is not life It is not verdant, growth, eternal It is not a leaf or a clover It is nothing but Green is a color, a slice of spectrum Green is not those other things It is color, frequency, not even universal Some see gray, some see nothing at […]
To the ‘why’ of suffering we get no firm answer. Of course some suffering is easily seen to be the result of our sin: war, assault, poverty amidst plenty, the hurtful word. And maybe some is chastisement. But not all. The meaning of the remainder is not told us. It […]