For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been obsessed. Pretty much every spare moment I’ve had has been spent studying, reading about, and wrestling with a particular story from the Hebrew Bible: Jehu’s rebellion in 2 Kings 9-10. A strange thing for me to be obsessing over, I know. It’s a violent mess of a … Continue reading Stories Matter.
Some passages of Scripture are complex, inviting us to lots of study and contemplation. Others, though no less important, are simpler and can often serve as helpful reminders — even they feel at times like two-by-fours to the back of the head. Today’s offering from the Gospels is in the latter category. Jesus is at … Continue reading One Thing Needful (A Reflection on Luke 10.38-42)
One of my areas of learning over the summer has been permaculture, particularly as people are applying it to communities. One of the most interesting conversations going on in that space is the problem of scalability: how to get the micro and macro to functioning together based on the same values and principles. A common … Continue reading Fractal Faith
[This post is part of a series that looks at religion and faith using concepts and tools gained from linguistics. Part I of the series is available here.] No two people share the same way of talking. Even within the same family, our pronunciations vary a little, we have different vocabularies, and prefer certain sentence … Continue reading Languages and Dialects of Faith
As I was writing my post for the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels the other day, I was struck by something in the text from the Apocalypse that had slipped past my notice in previous readings. In the dense symbolic language of its genre, the text describes a battle between warring factions in … Continue reading “I Saw Satan Fall like Lightning” (Further thoughts on Revelation 12.7-12)
Matthew Root 