Month: May 2018
Samwise’s Pentecost
Thinking on Pentecost, which comes up this weekend, I was struck in my reading of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers by a scene strangely reminiscent of what happened in the Upper Room. It is an...
Writing Tracker – Week 19 (May 6 – 12)
Writers write. That’s the bottom line. Last week was far and away my most productive week in terms of words put down on paper. I closed in on 20,000 words, which is double what I...
How to Love the Alien and Fight Bureaucratization: Refugees as Data
The biggest problem I’ve seen in my work to aid refugees is a lack of resources—financial, material, manpower, and willpower. The second biggest problem I’ve seen is the pervasive perversion of bureaucracy. This is one...
Genealogy of Jesus – Part 4: Descent from Antiquity
Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus ends this way: Thus there were fourteen generations in all from Abraham to David, fourteen from David to the exile to Babylon, and fourteen from the exile to the Messiah. Luke’s...
Genealogy of Jesus – Part 3: You’ve Got to Know the Word to Know the Word
Reading all of the names in the genealogy of Jesus, I know I’ve read them before. I know I’ve read their stories, some of the brief and boring, some more enthralling. But for most of these individuals, I...
Genealogy of Jesus – Part 2: Fathers and Foreigners
If we are in the Church, we are children of Abraham. Heirs of the promise and inheritors of the lineage of Christ. Jesus calls us brothers and sisters. So I shouldn’t read the names from...
Genealogy of Jesus – Part 1: It’s My Family Tree, Too
I love genealogies. For Christmas one year I received a subscription to ancestry.com. I ended up devoting the next 12 months to tracing my lineage as far back as I could go and down all...
Writing Tracker – Week 18 (April 29 – May 5)
Writers write. That’s the bottom line. Here’s the good news. My fiction writing is going great. It’s also what I enjoy writing the most, and I’ve really jumped into it totally. The bad news is...
Relief AND Development
When reading the transcript of the meeting of the World Council of Churches in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 1969, I was struck by the idea that “relief work” in so many NGO contexts had been dissected...
Writing Tracker – Week 17 (April 22 – 28)
Writers write. That’s the bottom line. My writing pace picked back up last week! It tends to do that when I get back into my fiction. As I’ve noted before, I write fiction considerably faster...