I’ve been teaching on spiritual disciplines as evangelism at Otter Creek the last four weeks. Tomorrow, I’m going to teach (with a friend) on the power of confession.
The tendency in many confessions (public/private; religious/secular) is for the one confessing to tell the amount of truth necessary to convince the audience of a contrite heart without [...]

In Europe, in the 1840’s in the best hospitals (London General, Paris Maternite, and Dresden Maternity), a mysterious fever hit maternity wards in epidemic fashion. The hardest hit hospital was General Hospital in Vienna. Between 1841-1846 twenty thousand babies were born; two thousand mothers died (that’s 1 in 10). In 1847 things got worse: 1 [...]

Tonight, I’m speaking at Otter Creek’s Vespers gathering on forgiveness and reconciliation. I’m going to say something like this (based upon stuff I’ve written in The Feast).
The corporate and individual power of sin consume much of contemplative life.
Bishop Desmond Tutu offers one way to engage the subject of sin in healthy and life-affirming fashion.1 Bishop [...]

Sometimes ministers wish for a do-over. We find ourselves in some of the most awkward conversations at some of the strangest times of the day. I recall as a graduate student in Nashville on my way to preach for a church early one Sunday morning. I was driving my little Saturn Ion from Nashville into [...]

“I hear addicts talk about the shakes and panic attacks and the highs and lows of resisting their habit, and to some degree I understand them because I have had habits of my own, but no drug is so powerful as the drug of self. No rut in the mind is so deep as the [...]

I know men are not supposed to dwell too much on their physical appearance, lest they become suspicious to their surrounding friendship network. I need to confess that lately I’ve been thinking about my physical appearance. I’m not talking about my receding hair-line, or my height, or the teeth that bare the reality that I [...]

From C.S. Lewis . . .
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.I never had a selfless thought since I was born.I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through;I want God, you, all friends merely to serve my turn.
Peace, reassurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek, I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin;I [...]