I found the following video fascinating. It’s not that the content is all that incredible – it’s essentially a simple retelling of the story of Jesus’ encounter with Mary and Martha followed by a brief interpretation of why this story is important to the narrator. Rather, it’s the very fact that a popular “secular” (not my favorite term, but…) author uses the story at all, let alone to good effect. Gretchen Rubin is the author of The Happiness Project and it’s follow-up Happier at Home, both of which are geared toward helping people discover and lay hold of practices that will make them – you guessed it – happier. On...

On this 43rd Earth Day I thought I’d reflect just briefly on a biblical approach to caring for the environment. Which can, of course, be a tricky thing, as the Bible can be a challenging book to interpret. It is just diverse enough, and the history of its interpretation just broad enough, that readers can come to very different conclusions about any number of issues. Indeed, over the history of the church, the Bible has been interpreted so as to support a huge variety of positions, even those that may seem diametrically opposed. For instance, there were biblical arguments used to justify opposition to slavery and to support slavery. And...

I found the results of a recent poll about patterns of reading the Bible fascinating, discouraging, and not unexpected all at the same time. In short, the survey, conducted by the Barna Group on behalf of the American Bible Society, discovered that while Americans have a very high view of the Bible, they don’t read it much. As an article put out by the Religious News Service describes it, More than half of Americans think the Bible has too little influence on a culture they see in moral decline, yet only one in five Americans read the Bible on a regular basis, according to a new survey…. The survey showed the Bible is still firmly rooted...

Seems like an easy question, but here’s why I ask. The story of the Prodigal Son – which, along with that of the Good Samaritan – is probably the most famous of  Jesus’ parables. And it’s the reading this Sunday in those churches that use the Revised Common Lectionary, which means that a lot of preachers will be asking just this question. Before answering it, it may help to set the parable in context: Jesus has been preaching, teaching, healing and more to the delight of some and to the consternation of others. Luke captures the general goings-on of this part of Jesus’ ministry in the verses that set the stage for the...

Two more Bible Story Jam videos. The first on Luke 10:25-37, and the second on Luke 13:1-9, 31-35. Actually, not just two more, but the two last…at least for a while. We’ve had great fun doing these Bible Story Jams – you can learn more about the original idea and how we went about making them at an earlier post – and we hope others were inspired to practice reading and talking about biblical stories. Our hope all along is that we take the Bible off the altar, so to speak, and put it in the hands of everyday Christians, and we’ve been encouraged by the response. But for now, each of us has some other work we need to get to. We...

As I mentioned in a post late last week, I was torn between continuing my devotional reading of Luke and jumping to the Passion for Lent and then coming back to where we left off. I asked for help…and you gave it. The overwhelming preference was to move to the Passion now. So we will! With that in mind, just a few things to orient us to Luke in general and, in particular, Luke’s story of our Lord’s Passion. Of the four evangelists, Luke is the one who most clearly thinks of himself as a historian. Not a 21st century historian, mind you, but a 1st century historian who tells a story in order to teach the truth…which is of course...