A Little Help For Some Friends

Blogging is, at its worst, shamelessly self-promotional and narcissistic.  I always hope I can be a bit better than that worst, even with my usual posts but TODAY, especially, I’m giving it a shot, for a good cause.
An organization I believe is doing INCREDIBLE kingdom work is the Pregnancy Clinic of Bowie/Crofton – Severna Park.  [...]

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Gratitude for Godly Teachers

This morning, wrapping up a devotional time with my daughters before we headed off to school, I asked Ellie, who is a senior this year, to pray for our day.  In the course of her prayer, she petitioned God to have mercy on our nation and on our leaders as we face the upheavals in the present economy.  She prayed [...]

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Still Playing

This might just be the only way you’ll get two posts in one day out of me… 
This one is a wordle of my favorite Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Pied Beauty, which I mentioned in a previous post. 
 
Don’t you love how these words taste?

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Playing (Praying?)

I’m a little slow on these things, so maybe I’m the last one to hear about wordles… but I’ve been having fun with them after discovering them on several friends’ blogs.   Here’s the one I was playing with tonight, for a snippet in our church newsletter on prayer:

 
 

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The Immaturity of Modern Art

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.”  ~Edith Wharton
Greg Wilbur, whose thoughts I respect on this sort of thing, had a short post today with a link to an encouraging article about a critic’s response to the artwork (??) of Damien Hirst.  It’s [...]

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Beauty and the Christian mind

Musing, lately (more than usual), on the relation of faith to beauty.   God’s common grace allows all men to enjoy beauty.  Yet beauty is of, and flows from, God.  In what sense does a Christian have better eyes to see the beauty around him?  Does the Christian have a heightened capacity to create true beauty?
But what is it that [...]

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I Am Not A Nut

That poetry engages the emotions and the senses, and that God put so much poetry in the Bible, assures me that I’m not a nut.  At least not as much as I might otherwise think.  There’s an implied affirmation of that side of my humanity that doesn’t fit neatly into quantifiable medical and scientific statistics [...]

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Making Time

A good friend visited me this week from out of town, and I heard myself telling him, as we sat on the porch this evening,
“You don’t know how unusual this is for me to take two evenings off in a row to just talk and play!“
Sometimes some of the best things God wants to teach [...]

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When I Consider

So frequently my evangelism  takes the delightful form of preaching the gospel to my own kids.  And myself.  Not always sure that second one counts as evangelism, but I preach away anyway, as needed.  So, as I continue to meditate on how the Psalms can be used effectively in evangelism, my mind keeps straying back to [...]

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The Psalms and Rilke: On Questions Unanswered

One of the Psalms that has most significantly impacted me in the last few years is Psalm 88, for the simple fact that it seems to be the singular Psalm that doesn’t end “up.” Sometimes there isn’t a clear “up” in sight.  Sometimes, for a period of time, we’re simply left with the wrestling.   There’s still FAITH [...]

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