Michelangelo’s last sculpture is puzzling – two imprecise figures of Jesus and Mary melting into one, with a fragment of Jesus’s right arm detached from his body. It’s the Pietà Rondanini, the third and last pietà sculpted by the artist,…
The grand storyline of the Bible can at times make depressing reading if we do not pay close attention to the gospel threads that hold it together. After its glorious beginning in the accounts of creation in Genesis, our high…
Holiness has too often been embroiled in confusion and distortion within the Christian community and, sadly, ends up being neglected rather than cultivated within the church. This is especially true in times, like our own, when the gospel becomes more…
I love photography and, although I’m not a great photographer, I have learned some of the secrets of capturing a scene or portrait effectively: the most important being to choose angles that allow the details to stand out clearly. When…
As we’ve seen, the Puritans had a rich understanding of Christian marriage (part 1, part 2, part 3). In this final post, I’d like to show that they also believed marital love must be sexual. Both marital partners should give…
Jennifer Marie, my dear wife, died on the fourteenth of September last year.[1] She was thirty-eight. We had barely made it to our eighteenth wedding celebration the month before. Our four young covenant children prepared and served us a special…
Contrary to characatures, the Puritans had a lot to say about love, and marital love in particular. In our continuing series (post #1, post #2) we take up their teaching that marital love must be superlative. A husband and…
Edward Taylor (c. 1642–1729), a pastor, physician, and poet of Puritan New England, wrote, “A curious knot God made in Paradise…. It was the true-love knot, more sweet than spice” (“Upon Wedlock, and Death of Children,” in The Poems of…
Exuberant over an experience, an oh-so-sweet manifestation of divine providence, you delightedly seek to give God praise in telling your story. “It was such a ‘God thing’,” you proclaim. As you see it, God wove together an otherwise inexplicable combination…
I mean it when I say that I would love my church to be filled Sunday after Sunday with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (or questioning) individuals. And I mean it when I say that I would love to…
