Dear Partner in Preaching, Let me suggest a totally different way to approach this text. I’ve written it on it from the perspective of how Mark’s “divorce text” relates to questions of marriage before, and there are certainly excellent commentaries available on this theme. But what strikes me this time around is that perhaps we don’t need to read this as addressed to individuals but rather as something descriptive of, and helpful to, a community. Bear with me a moment while I explain. When this passage is read at church, we tend to hear it in an intensely personal way. This is particularly true, of course, if you have gone through...

Dear Partner in Preaching, Who are you? Really. Take a moment to ponder that question…and then ask yourself how you came to that answer. Do you, that is, define yourself by your accomplishments, or your history, or particular critical experiences, or your relationships, or some combination of the above? Another way to get at this question might be to ask, who gets to tell you who you are? Who, that is, has the most influence in shaping your self-image? Is it your parents, your partner or spouse, your friends and colleagues? Or perhaps it’s the world of advertising, which constantly tries to overwhelm us with ads picturing perfect people...

If you haven’t seen Dave Isay’s TED Talk on how his project StoryCorps got started in Grand Central Station in NYC, you need to watch it. It’s 21 minutes that will rush by as we learn again the power of story and, more than simply story, of simply listening to each other. StoryCorps is a project that invites people to interview other people they know and love and archive those stories so that they are preserved. Isay shares excerpts of several interviews. They will make you smile, cry, and laugh. They are, in a word, amazing. Stories are powerful because through our stories we make sense of our lives, share our selves,...

You’ve probably heard the phrase, “Good is the enemy of great.” I don’t know where it originated, but I know I first came across it in the book that made it famous: Jim Collin’s Good to Great, a fascinating study of how some companies came to dominate their fields. The basic logic is simple: if you’re satisfied with being pretty good, there’s no reason to work harder to become great. True enough, and important to remember. I’ve seen the “good is the enemy of great” phenomenon almost everywhere. In students who decide a B- isn’t that bad. In teachers content with their familiar lecture or syllabus, changed very little...