Featured Image Credit: Kathe Kollwitz, "The Widow," print, 1921 On Sunday, we continued to write laments in the style of the ancient Israelites. As I said in the last post, the genre of Biblical lament has five basic parts: invocation; honest complaint; expressions of confidence; petition; and praise. In today’s post, I’ll talk about honest … Continue reading Laments & Honest Complaint
This Lent we are writing laments, as many of us feel that the entire world is lamenting, crying out to God in pain, uncertainty, and suffering. We are studying lament as a Biblical genre, and shaping our own lamenting to fit that genre. Trying to write in a poetic form that emerged in a very … Continue reading Laments & Invocations
A friend asked me for my definition of hope, and I found myself talking about covenant. Hope is the love of neighbor and the world that keeps you going, despite all of the reasons for despair. During an interfaith panel that I sat on a student asked how the panelists different traditions maintained hope in … Continue reading “A Psalm” by Thomas Merton
The Parable of the Sower is the first parable in Luke’s Gospel, and includes a handy teaching on the very nature of parables and what we can expect from them in v. 10. Richard Rohr compares parables to Zen koans. They’re meant to split apart our normal ways of thinking about things and help us … Continue reading Luke 8:1-25 Being the Good Soil
In the second semester of my sophomore year of college - a semester when I was alone most of the time, and sad, mourning the end of a relationship and trying to figure out who I was without the girl who had left - during this depressing semester I took a class called “Philosophy of … Continue reading What Kind of God Exists?
KPB Stevens 