28th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, RCL)

The decline of mainline Protestantism is clear. What's less clear is what the church should do about it.

As a second-generation Korean American, it is hard to identify stories from my past that can serve as reservoirs of understanding for my life now. “In you our ancestors trusted,” I could proclaim from those stories, “and you delivered them.”

By the third century, the gesture of giving became miniaturized.

The New Testament offers two compelling models for our relationship with money. When translated into a vision for a whole society, each is flawed.

"Poetry invites you to have an experience. It doesn't want you to drift away into inattention. It wants to grab you."

Who is this leader who issues this warning? Do we even begin to believe that he's the Christ?

After two years, I visited my ailing friend. Eventually, he asked for the Eucharist—and suddenly every word mattered.

In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, my dad couldn't sing national songs. The Nazis saw the church's Psalter, however, as innocuous. Little did they know.

"It is by being in solidarity with sinners that Jesus brings about reconciliation. This is not a picture of Jesus that churches often emphasize."

Peter Brown considers the fourth-century church's radicality concerning wealth—and its readiness to adapt as circumstances seemed to require.

There is no denying that in today’s world a culture of loneliness and isolation plagues individuals of every age, race and socioeconomic status. Although the church provides a sacred community that may help combat this loneliness, even the most devout believers have, at one time or another, questioned how or even if God is present in their suffering.

The psalmist knows loneliness. Even the most faithful believers have anguished over the fear that somehow God is not listening to their cries.

Some years ago, a small group in our church watched the award-winning documentary The Fog of War, in which former secretary of defense Robert McNamara talks about his life, especially the Vietnam War.

Why caricature the rich man as smug and self-righteous when Mark shows him humbly asking an existential question?

People who are satisfied and content do not seek Jesus—only those who know there is something missing from their lives.