Yesterday, I introduced this year’s Lenten series, which will be daily reflections on famous or important liturgical prayers. As a general principle, I’ll be treating the season of Lent like a liturgical day, starting with the evening offices then going through the daytime services. But today I’m going to start with the quintessential Lenten prayer … Continue reading A Faith That Works: The Lenten Prayer of St. Ephrem the Syrian
A recurring theme here lately has been the contrasts between the kingdoms of this world and their theologies of glory on the one hand, and the kingdom of God with its theology of the cross on the other. Nowhere does Christianity’s theology of the cross come to the fore more than in the Western Christian … Continue reading A Kingdom of Dust and Ashes: A Reflection for Ash Wednesday 2026
Today marks the end of this series exploring the way conceptions of God and our relation to God evolved through the ‘sacred history’ of the Scriptures. We’ve seen how one man’s personal covenant with a local god, in which he’d be blessed with land and a family line, evolved step by step into a covenant … Continue reading The God(s) of the Generations
The more I see so much of public-facing Christianity descend into madness, the more I’ve appreciated Martin Luther’s distinction between a theology of glory and the theology of the cross. The former is triumphant and triumphalist and sees God’s blessing revealed in power, success, and wealth. The latter understands that as Christians there can be … Continue reading Genuine Glory: A Reflection on Matthew 17.1-9
This series has looked at the ways in which people of faith — and the witness they left behind in the stories included in the Scriptures — understood their experiences of God changed over the course of the Bible. So far, all of this has been in (and after) what we Christians call the Old … Continue reading The God of the Apostles
Matthew Root 