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OK, so since Pope Francis is going to Assisi this Saturday to sign an encyclical I’m going to be focused on, let me take some time tonight to tell you a couple of things about St. Francis of Assisi. If you know me at all, you know that the little medieval hill town of Assisi
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We put the wrong aspect of God in the center. I don’t get many requests for theological opinions. (Perhaps that’s a hint I should have taken a long time ago.) But my sister, of all people, asked me a question last week, and it’s a good one: Does God cause bad things to happen so
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Why are you looking for God? I’ve been mulling this question a lot, from the perspective of what draws different people to religious belief. It’s a rephrasing of a question at the center of Luke 7-8, which is a really meaty set of healings and sayings between the Sermon on the Plain (in Luke 6)
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I wouldn’t go. There are bumper stickers around the Tampa Bay Area that say “Terry Would Go”. They’re a tribute to Terry Tomalin, who was the outdoors editor for the St. Pete/Tampa Bay Times and by all accounts a force of nature. I have friends who were close to Terry and are still deeply affected
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Hey, so I found a great way to get thrown off a cliff by an angry crowd! One of the things that Luke Johnson’s commentary on the Gospel of Luke has helped me see is how the author of this Gospel focuses on reordering events to help tell his story of Jesus, even to the
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It’s often striking, the discrepancy between what gets called “Good News” in the Bible and what we who read it think of it. Luke’s third chapter is not very long and a lot of it seems kind of boring, because it’s primarily about setting the scene for the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. Amidst an opening
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I have been low-level obsessed with an ad, and the questions it raises. A friend sent along this phenomenal ad from Italian coffeemaker Lavazza this week, and of course what is so striking is how relevant the message is. Even more so when you learn that it’s from a speech Charlie Chaplin made in 1940.
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As many times I have now watched and listened to Hamilton, “Wait For It” remains far and away my favorite song from the show. It might have been Luke’s too. There is so much to say about the Gospel of Luke, and in its first two chapters, so much is said. Tonight I want to
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Luke is the prequel to the Acts of the Apostles and my favorite of the four gospels. It’s written so beautifully that I had to put the Good News translation away and go back to a more traditional one that is true to its poetry. There’s a lot, just in Chapter 1. Last week I
Reading Francis 