The Prince of Life

  Death and life have contended in that combat stupendous. The Prince of Life, who died, reigns immortal. Alleluia! (Victimae Paschali Laudes) As I grow older, I find myself increasingly interested in obituaries (I wonder why). And there, one often reads that the deceas...
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The Donkey’s Vital Work, and Ours

  “Jesus . . . sent two of his disciples and said to them: ‘Go into the village opposite you, and immediately upon entering it, you will find a colt tethered on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone should say to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’...
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Read Love First

  When he was in high school, my eldest son was assigned Jonathan Edwards’s famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” He was to compare it with a sermon of his own choosing—one his deeply Calvinist teacher might expect him to find wanting in light of the...
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About Conspiracy Theories

Psalm 83 For they conspire with one accord; against you they make a covenant (83:5).    “Conspiracy theorist” is a term thrown about much these days, usually to belittle those who believe that sometimes people engage in, well, conspiracies. Call someone a conspiracy theorist...
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Inbal Malca @iaminbaltal

After January 5th

The call of the church is to transcend the “myopias and smallnesses” of our present circumstances.
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Photo by Robert Stokoe from Pexels

Trust Not in Princes

  The LORD watches over the sojourners; he upholds the widow and the fatherless, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin (Psalm 146:9). I write this on the morning of Election Day, and therefore do not know how things will turn out. And in a way, it does not matter, for...
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A Prayer for the Vulnerable

Sometimes it is difficult to know how to pray, and we are helped by the words of others. The following is a prayer for the vulnerable, particularly the unborn, taken from Psalm 35. Contend, O LORD, with those who contend with the vulnerable—children who cannot contend for...
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The Trick of Life

  Once in a while, I come across a quotation that clears away the fog and threatens to fundamentally reorient my thinking. I had such a moment recently, reading an excerpt from a letter written by a father to his 18-year-old adopted son. Here it is, taken from Gilbe...
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A Beautiful Problem

Our family has a dear friend, Hannah, a young woman in her late twenties who moved to Moscow to learn the Russian language roughly six weeks before the country went on lockdown due to COVID-19. Her host family has made her feel welcome, but neither Russian nor English is their...
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The Cost of Courage

  For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love, power, and a sound mind (2 Timothy 1:7). Recently, I read a column in the National Review about three missing journalists who had dared to report on the unfolding coronavirus crisis in China. The story focused on the...
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