The Bible loves to play with contrasts. It confronts the reader with choices, often drawn in stark terms: sometimes these are about good and bad, as in the two ways of Psalm 1 that lead either to fertility or barrenness; but at other times, the contrasts are more nuanced, such as the two holy mountains … Continue reading The Wilderness and the Land: A Reflection on Deuteronomy 26.1-11 and Luke 4.1-13
Two years ago for Ash Wednesday, I wrote about how 2020 was shaping up to be an apocalyptic year. And that was when COVID-19 was still a couple weeks away from becoming the pandemic that has overshadowed pretty much everything else since. Suffice it to say that the news has not gotten any better over … Continue reading From Under the Rubble (Again): A Reflection for Ash Wednesday 2022
Today marks the last Sunday before the start of Lent. It’s therefore also the end of a wonderfully leisurely season after Epiphany (because a late Easter has given us two extra weeks before Lent this year). Today also marks the fourth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, an event which has further destabilized a … Continue reading Transfigured Lives: A Reflection on Luke 9.28-36 and 2 Corinthians 3.12-4.2
If I had to summarize what this series about tradition has been all about it would come down to two points: Tradition is inevitable, and tradition is always changing. Tradition, and therefore our lives and societies, live in the tension between what we receive and how we receive it. This means that, if we truly … Continue reading Tradition(ed): An Integral Approach
I originally framed my reasons for undertaking this series on tradition in primarily external terms: tradition is an inescapable force in culture and yet the only people who seem to be talking about it are either reactionaries, who insist we need to return to the past (or at least their imagined version of it), or … Continue reading Tradition(ed): The Lament of the Dead
Matthew Root 