Shows
What 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
TransmissionsTransmissions: 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