The Parable of the Good Samaritan,’ Francesco Bassano - 1575, from the Art History Museum in Vienna. I will admit that it can be...

I picture Jesus' hometown family and friends squirming in their synagogue seats and craning their necks to see if he's coming up the...

When you get on board BART, a Cal-Train, or even Amtrak, which seats do you choose?  Do you like the seats that face front, the direction...

What does silence mean to you?  Time to rest? Peace? Or “Oh, oh. The kids are too quiet. What are they up to now?”  Whatever silence...

A bird or a flame. Traditionally, these are the most common images used as metaphors for the Holy Spirit. The ornithological metaphor is...

There they were, a house full of them, Luke says, all moping around wondering what they were going to do without Jesus, when they heard a...

“Prayer”, Kathleen Norris writes, “is being ourselves before God.” Having invested much of her time in working, studying and praying in a...

In the final chapter of his book The Remarkable Ordinary, author Frederick Buechner offers a disarming and often touching walk through an...

I was standing in a hospital room many years ago now. It was during one of a dozen such stays after my dad's first heart surgery. A...

Good Shepherd, Russian icon. … When we hear the lesson of the Good Shepherd, it is a grave and perhaps even diverting temptation to...

I believe that we know much more about God than we admit that we know, than perhaps we altogether know that we know. God speaks to us, I...

(Carved- Painted Frieze Notre Dame Cathedral – Paris) We have a common saying that expresses our insistence on tangible proof of every...

WE CAN SAY THAT the story of the Resurrection means simply that the teachings of Jesus are immortal like the plays of Shakespeare or the...

We call it Palm Sunday because maybe they were palm branches that were thrown into the road in front of him as he approached the city-a...

There was a place called Bethany. And like Boring, Oregon or Greasy, Oklahoma, Sleepy Eye, Minnesota or Cranky Corner, Louisiana -- real...

Parables are curious things… That’s what I said last week when we read the Parable of the Unproductive Fig Tree . I also said that the...

In his beautiful book of narrative theology, In the Shelter: Finding Welcome in the Here and Now , poet and healer Pádraig Ó Tuama...

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to [Jesus], “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, “Go and...

In many cultures there is an ancient custom of giving a tenth of each year's income to some holy use. For Christians, to observe the...

I was officiating at a funeral a while back. I was working then with a funeral home I don't work with all that often, and somehow this...