Isaac S. Villegas

The Spirit affirms our differences, speaking in ways that each of us can understand—yet also drawing us together.

In Acts, the gospel takes on organizational structure.

We hope and pray that God will meet us, even if God feels absent to us.

Jesus has gone underground. That's the setting of our Gospel reading this Pentecost.

Christian theology is a love story.

The church organizes its life in the wake of absence.

The Brazilian activist was killed by the same world that killed Jesus—a world that can’t bear love.

Incarceration is a tomb. It beats death into people.

Every week, Cameron visited the lonely and afflicted. Now I’m visiting him.

Denominational meetings can be difficult. My Sunday school class reminds me what's at stake.

Nature reveals itself as ruptured, as already profaned. To rest into a landscape is to be drawn into an adulterated history.

“Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.” The author of 1 John invites us to put our love into action—to love with our lives. Love is a commandment: “love one another, just as [Jesus] has commanded us.” If we follow this commandment to love, then we are in communion with God: “All who obey his commandments abide in him, and he abides in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the Spirit that he has given us.”

When I pray the words of Psalm 23, the “you” I address them to is God. But I hope others will overhear.

Last summer, Charles Moore, a retired Methodist minister, nearly 80 years old, parked in a strip mall in his hometown of Grand Saline, Texas, pulled out a gas can from his trunk, drenched his clothes with gasoline, knelt down, and lit a match. He died in flames.

Touch me and see, said the prisoners. Shake my hand and discover that I am human like you.

For Elizabeth Kolbert, the human story reads like a Greek tragedy. Near the end, we realize too late that we brought about our own demise.

Joshua Dubler shows up at a maximum-security prison as a budding ethnographer. He becomes a man captured by friendships.

When the angel of the Lord told Elijah to go to Mount Horeb, Elijah knew he would encounter God. After all, Horeb was where God spoke to Moses with fire and to Israel with a storm. But for Elijah, God didn’t show up as expected. 

“The story of Naboth is old in time but daily in practice,” said Ambrose of Milan. “Who of the wealthy does not strive to drive off the poor person from his little acre and turn out the needy from the boundaries of his ancestral field?” Our world was and is ruled by those who control militaries and cartels, banks and corporations—the heirs of King Ahab’s insatiable desire and unrestrained power.