The other week, I reflected on the Gospel reading in which Jesus expounds on what seems like a foretelling of a frightening future, but is really more a description of the human condition: Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and … Continue reading Hope of the Nations: An Advent Reflection on Isaiah 2.1-5
In the last post, we saw how Ephesus, and Asia Minor more generally, was a place that took spiritual power of all kinds — gods and goddesses, angels and demons, blessings and curses, and all of the spells, incantations, potions, amulets and charms one could use to manipulate them — very seriously. This likely provided … Continue reading A Question of Power: Ephesians 1.15-23 (Part II)
In the previous post in this series on the history of Biblical interpretation, I introduced personal, devotional readings of the Scriptures through the lens of the monastic practices of lectio divina and Gospel Contemplation. Today we’ll turn to similarly personal approaches in the Protestant world. With the Reformation’s twin focuses on the importance of the … Continue reading “Hear What the Spirit is Saying to the Churches”: Reading the Bible in the Pentecostal and Black Churches
This series, Theology from under the Rubble, has looked at faithful Christian responses to a wide range of crises, external and internal, personal and corporate. Today I’d like to look more specifically at the crisis of the Church, which has itself undergone that same range of external and internal, local and universal calamities. Internally, the … Continue reading The Paschal Mystery of the Church: Fr. Alexander Men and the End of the Soviet Empire
One of the reasons I wanted to tackle this series looking at different Biblical metaphors for sin and salvation is that Western Christianity has, over the past thousand years, come to ignore a lot of this diversity. The ancient abundance of images has been replaced with an almost singular focus on a criminal justice metaphor … Continue reading Bondage and Freedom
Matthew Root 