Shows
What Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithLiturgical Essentials: Bath, Book, Meal, and Attentiveness to the poor.When the apostle Paul met with the leaders of the Jerusalem church and received their blessing and acknowledgement of his calling to minister to the Gentiles, Paul recalled that, “They asked only one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do” (Gal 2:10).2025-08-0711 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithYou can baptize with sand.Those responsible for planning and leading worship need to know a little more than that!2025-07-2411 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithEmbracing RitualRecognized or not, ritual is basic to human life, not something primitive to be left behind as we learn to live more and more in our reasoning heads.2025-07-1710 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithSpiritual deathSometimes it feels embarrassing even to say the word “God” seriously in certain circles. 2025-07-0410 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe cultural authority once granted to the church has been withdrawn.To prioritize trying to save our institutional life at any cost is a worthless endeavor if it leads us to be embarrassed by the very faith that God called the church into being to preserve and advance.2025-06-2710 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithAtheist?Archbishop William Temple said that, “If you have a false idea of God, the more religious you are, the worse it is for you—it were better for you to be an atheist.” We’re living in times when, given all the options in play, it might be that to be an atheist may be the better choice.2025-06-1910 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWe have a soul-sickness problem that manifests as a language problem.Maybe the church can rejuvenate its mission in the world by majoring for a while in careful listening. It may be that what the world needs most is a people dedicated to hearing.2025-06-1210 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe power of Evil.Jesus’ confrontation with demonic powers has been validated, his struggle vindicated. The written story of Jesus’ ascension makes use of naive images that serve a purpose so long as we don’t get hung up on aerodynamic details.2025-06-0510 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithBasic values require a sound foundation.For people of faith, the foundation lies in our perception of who God is.2025-05-2910 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe Holy TrinityThe Muslims have my sympathy. Those who find themselves hung up on the arithmetic of one and three have my sympathy. The atheists have my sympathy. But the God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit lays claim to something else: my heart, and soul, and mind. 2025-05-2210 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWhy the church?The church is nothing less than a priestly community whose purpose is to represent, as best as it can, something of God’s deep interest in the welfare of the whole human family.2025-05-1511 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithDoubt doesn’t have to be cynical.I’d like to think that Thomas is using doubt as a tool with which to dig deeper. Doubt plays a role for people who work in any serious discipline. It can serve to test what we think we know. 2025-05-0811 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe kingdom of God is about justice, but justice is elusive in history and often thwarted.Anyone who preaches, or listens to sermons, has discovered that the text for last Sunday’s sermon and the one for this Sunday’s sermon may seem to point in opposite directions. Last Sunday’s text: grace. This Sunday’s: Judgment. Human beings tend to be uncomfortable with ambiguity. . . .2025-05-0111 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithA traveling Bible study for some whose faith has been shaken.The authoritative voice one may learn to discern in Scripture is often drowned out by the sheer abundance and volume of other voices. But it hasn’t gone silent. Jesus’ voice always does the same thing: clears some things up; unsettles others. If you pay attention, Jesus’ voice, interpreting Scripture, wakes you up.2025-04-2511 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith“’In the afterlife,’ Maud May told me, ‘God’s got a lot of explaining to do.’”God, viewed cross-wise, reveals God’s self not as relating to the world in dominating power, but rather as a God become present to the world in weakness, in vulnerability, in sharing the all-too-familiar status of victim.2025-04-1711 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe eucharistic prayer in the newer service books highlights the central affirmations of the Christian gospel.Praying the Great Thanksgiving at Communion led me, over time, to reflect more deeply about eschatology, about which seminarians learn a little and then try to forget lest they be mistaken for fanatics!2025-04-1010 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe anticipation of heaven’s refuge did not reject the hope of a cosmic redemption, but gradually pushed it to one side.“In scripture’s images of a heavenly banquet, we are led to a big-picture redemption, a cosmic resurrection, a transfiguration of heaven and earth, where God’s expansive generosity will be realized in the reign of Christ, whose embrace reaches to me and mine, but not only to me and mine!”2025-04-0310 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithAdam and Eve had persuaded themselves that God might not be playing fair with them.Adam and Eve did what’s so easy to do: They followed their impulses, naively abandoned their trust as though trust were just a trick meant to deceive them. So, they reached out for that one off-limits thing that would prove to be, sooner or later, a terrible blend of heaven and hell.2025-03-2710 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithFaith is, in some sense, always a mystery.“It does not take much exposure to religious extremism to find oneself sufficiently repelled as to want to distance ourselves, to shake the dust off our feet, to stalk off and leave it all to those Christians who seem to have kidnapped the God we thought we knew.” 2025-03-2011 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on Faith“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” says Jesus.“I have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now,” says Jesus. The Holy Spirit speaks to the church; and we find ourselves rejecting some ideas that seemed like sure-enough certainties for centuries. The divine right of kings, trashed. Slavery, discarded; race-based privilege no longer credible. Male domination, rejected. Caste systems, overruled. Disdain for those who don’t fit prevailing patterns of masculinity or femininity, getting over it.2025-03-1310 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWhy Does Love So Often Elude Us?“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate...I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” (Rom 7:15b, 19)2025-03-0610 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithDisenchantments“Growing up is, very often at least, a series of disenchantments.” As childhood gives way to adolescence, and adolescence to young adulthood, we’ve got to figure out what to do with that early naiveté. 2025-02-2710 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithJudgment and Love go Hand in HandIt’s easy to critique other tribes, other nations; but the prophets did what wasn’t expected and isn’t easy.2025-02-2010 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithAn Easter VisitorHe told me that it made no sense for me to be preaching about the resurrection to this young, well-educated congregation.2025-02-1311 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithThe Shock of Faith: It’s Nothing Like I Thought it Would BeIt was almost as though I had begun to hear a divine voice speaking to me in, under, and between the written words.2025-02-0610 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithFairest Lord Jesus, Ruler of All Nature. . .Austin Farrer argued that “while theologians of the late Middle Ages primarily looked in the scriptures for propositions and modern theologians have looked there to sort out what is historical, we should be looking for images.”2025-01-3011 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithWalking on WaterOne of the persistent questions about the New Testament is what to make of the stories that describe Jesus doing things that require the reader to suspend disbelief.2025-01-2210 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithPreach the Hard TextsSitting in that space between scripture and the tumble of the world, it seems the most rewarding sermons tend to be on the most difficult texts. Perhaps they are most often the most rewarding because they require the deepest dives into the text, the most artful wrestling of how to perceive and understand these things, both in themselves and in how they might touch the lives of people in contemporary society. In this episode, Byars posits that the intellectual and spiritual "lift" required make the more difficult texts perhaps especially important to tackle in one's preaching.2025-01-1609 minWhat Language Shall I Borrow: Reflections on FaithSame Words; Two Languages2025-01-1009 min
In Conversation: An OUP PodcastRonald Hutton, "The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft" (Oxford UP, 2019)Today we speak to Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom about the twentieth anniversary, and concomitant reissue, of the extremely important The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford UP, 2019). The author of over a dozen books and myriad articles, Professor Hutton’s work is both prodigious and percipient. We chat about the importance of the book and the reason for its reissue.Hutton brings witchcraft out of the shadows. The Triumph of the Moon is the first full-scale study of the only religion England has ever given the wor...2020-12-2329 min
New Books in SportsRonald Hutton, "The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft" (Oxford UP, 2019)Today we speak to Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom about the twentieth anniversary, and concomitant reissue, of the extremely important The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford UP, 2019). The author of over a dozen books and myriad articles, Professor Hutton’s work is both prodigious and percipient. We chat about the importance of the book and the reason for its reissue.Hutton brings witchcraft out of the shadows. The Triumph of the Moon is the first full-scale study of the only religion England has eve...2020-12-2329 min
All One Song: A Neil Young PodcastTransmissions: Georgia Anne MuldrowOn Mama You Can Bet, her new album under her Jyoti alias, Georgia Anne Muldrow embraces her jazz roots. Born and raised in Los Angeles, her parents were immersed in the city’s jazz community. Her father Ronald Muldrow worked with Eddie Harris; Rickie Byars-Beckwith, her mother, worked with Pharoah Sanders. And there’s the matter of her spiritual lineage: the Jyoti name was bestowed upon her by Alice Coltrane at her ashram. “I’ve had many experiences in that woman’s force field, and I’ve never forgot any of them,” Muldrow says, discussing how Coltrane’s work felt like “music from...2020-08-261h 05
Union Matters!Believer on Sunday, Atheist by ThursdayAuthor and professor emeritus Ronald P. Byars at home.Regular worshipers may be believers on Sunday but (nearly) atheists by Thursday. The general public, not making fine distinctions, lumps mainline Protestants together with fundamentalists fighting to hold on to a privileged status already lost. Circumstances favor religious skeptics, who find themselves with rising influence. Church members in mainline denominations feel caught between a rock and a hard place. Thus comes the critical question of the moment: is Christian faith of an intellectually serious and recognizably generous sort still possible? Union Presbyterian Seminary Professor Emeritus of Preaching and Worship Ronald P...2019-09-2040 min