Reflections from Seminary Students

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s 2004 novel, is one that I have heard a lot about for several years.  It is one of those books that seems to come up in discussions of favorites. The novel won the  2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  In addition President Barack Obama lists Gilead as one of his favorite books on his facebook page.  I attempted to read Gilead on a midnight greyhound to Spokane once, but the slow pace of the book could not compete with my increasingly strong desire to sleep or the strange characters that night busses always tend to collect.  This time around I was much more successful as we were reading Gilead as a class for THEO 6720: Vocational Discernment & Discipleship. » Read the rest of this entry «

Holy one,

You formed the cosmos and all that is within. You spoke your creation into motion. And when you saw it was good; we were good, you rested. You ceased. Help me to understand what it means to stop, to refrain from the busyness that has caused me to forget–us to forget–that you have called us sons and daughters–not slaves. Renew in us a desire to rest in you.

Busy and Proud of it?
I am guilty of speaking openly about my busyness.

Perhaps unintentionally. » Read the rest of this entry «

Have you ever seen the movie, “Talladega Nights”? Its got Will Ferrell in it so it is naturally inappropriate but way funny. In the movie Ferrell plays Ricky Bobby who is a stock car racer who is quickly becoming one of the winningness stock car racers in the sport. Towards the beginning of the movie, while things are still going well for Ricky Bobby, Ricky leads his family in saying grace before a dinner of Domino’s, KFC, Wonderbread, Poweraid, and Budweiser. Check out the 3-minute clip below.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Emmanuel, Rex, Oriens, Clavis, Radix, Adonai, Sapientia.

God-with-us, King, Dawn, Key, Root, Lord, Wisdom.

These are the O Antiphons. Continuing our theme of asking who we are waiting for, each of these titles refers to Isaiah’s prophecies of the one to come. You’ll note the bolded letters above in the Latin titles, which spell out “ero cras,” which means, “Tomorrow, I will come.”

Soon, the newborn king will arrive. Already crowned, yet immediately humble. » Read the rest of this entry «

photo by flickr user juank_madrigal

“It is imagination which allows us to escape from the constraints of immediate reality and to regard it with a critical eye, that is, to transcend the actual and project ourselves into the possible.” – Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining

In our Foundations of Youth and Family Ministry course, we’ve been reading Kenda Creasy Dean’s book, Almost Christian, and I can’t stop thinking about the term “missional imagination.” Of course, Dean is writing about adolescents in the book, but it seems to me that there’s a lot here for all of us when she describes what happens when adolescents begin to exercise missional imagination: ”teenagers begin to view the world as a place where God acts, and to see themselves as participants in God’s action.”

Often, what we imagine is very real. » Read the rest of this entry «