• Spiritual maturity
    Spiritual Maturity

    Spiritual Maturity: An Attempt at Definition

    Spiritual maturity is impossible to measure. I know. I have tried. When I worked for a small Christian liberal arts university, we wanted to test whether our students gained anything from all the spiritual formation groups, Bible courses, and chapels. I heard other Christian schools were trying to develop similar rubrics, but I never heard of a particularly successful measure. Measuring spiritual maturity is not like measuring knowledge. You can’t simply pass a test or write a paper.  In fact, a fair amount of disagreement exists about spiritual maturity. I think one might need to possess some to recognize it, but I hate even to nail that down. After all,…

  • Leviticus
    Leviticus

    The Profound Message of Leviticus: Dimming the Light

    Leviticus seemed to me to be an obscure book, meant only for the Jewish audience for whom the rules were a way of life. Then I met Jacob Milgrom, a professor at Hebrew University. He lectured in the downstairs bunker that belonged to Albert Einstein on the Mount Scopus campus to a group of college students from California. Worn out from our explorations of the rabbinical tunnels, I expected the weariness to increase because the topic of the day was Leviticus. Instead, Professor Milgrom lectured long past his ninety minutes, and still, the students did not want him to leave. The first big truth to hit me about the complicated…