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Jesus Was a Literature Professor
Literature professors are a determined lot. Our goal is to deepen our students’ engagement with the text at hand. We desperately want them to dive for the pearls deep below the surface and come up triumphant, gasping for air and eager to go deeper next time. I am aware that literature professors weren’t a thing in Jesus’ time. Jewish students who sat under their rabbis studied the Old Testament (though not as Christians today understand it.) They became rabbis and scribes, teaching what they learned to the next generation. And then came Jesus. He understood all the old texts and the traditional ways of reading them. But the way he…
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What’s So Extraordinary about Mary?
I have often heard it said in church circles that the Catholic church makes too much of Mary while the Protestant arm of the body makes too little. Not until I really looked into the life and decisions of Mary did I begin to realize how subversive, brave, and significant Mary is to the church, particularly women. She contributes some incredibly important and often overlooked encouragement to the role of women within the church. 1: Mary accepts God’s call on her life without consulting the men in her life. Mary doesn’t ask Gabriel to wait while she consults Joseph on this new development. She must be well aware that becoming…
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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,…
Healing Through Art & Words
