Who Do You Say I Am

"WHAT ARE THEY saying about me? What do you think about me?" Everybody has asked these questions but when Jesus of Nazareth posed them to his friends at Caesarea-Philippi, an ancient Roman cosmopolitan city on the edge of the Sea of Galilee, he started a discussion that continues to baffle, enrage and inspire people two millennia later. I have always wondered if these were real or trick questions. Was Jesus cornering Peter into giving the right dogmatic answer, later to be included in sacred writings, or was this an open question addressed to all people? I don't want

Read This Archive

A Tale of Two Cities

Stealing from the title of Dickens' book A Tale of Two Cities (1859) Watershed's story could be equally called A Tale of Two Wisdoms: God's Wisdom and Human Wisdom (1991-2015). I tell this story not in order to disparage the intellect or learning from a human point of view but rather to show how we might have used these two wisdoms incorrectly. Why and how wisdom gets expressed in our lives is what I have in mind.

Read This Archive

Spiritual Vocation: A Thessalonian Perspective

During a recent Watershed Worship and Discernment service, I confessed my Golden Calf: my creative use of language, my gift of teaching and speaking. The occasion for this confession was Tyler's comment that sometimes what we are overwhelmed by, even obsessed by creatively, can be a gift from God - an expression of our true vocation. To surrender oneself to that creativity seems not the creation of a Golden Calf but rather an enthusiastic response to the divine call. There is an important truth in Tyler's comment that our gifts are from God and that we ought to give ourselves to our vocations as an act of worship.

Read This Archive

I Believe in Dialogue: A Response to I Don't Believe in Atheists

After the first hour of reading Chris Hedges' I Don't Believe in Atheists, my animus toward the and very popular "fundamentalist" atheists was sated. Like Chris, I have as much disdain for these pompous ignoramuses as I do for narrow religious fundamentalists. Any wrongheaded and stubborn opinion rooted in ignorance ought to repulse us.

Read This Archive

Journey into Modern Culture: The Spiritual Theology of Richard Niebuhr

I selected Richard Niebuhr as an exemplar and trailblazer into modern culture because he combined the cataphatic (with image) and apophatic (without image) modes of spiritual life and thought. These technical terms from spiritual theology were not used by Niebuhr nor are they normally used by moral theologians, especially those practicing fifty years ago. Nonetheless, applying these terms from spiritual theology may revitalize Niebuhr's thought and position it in the context of spiritual theology.

Read This Archive