Bear’s Ears and Biblical Wildness Becoming Children of God Wilderness. An uncultivated, uninhabited, inhospitable region, says Google’s online dictionary. Or, it can be a neglected or abandoned area in a place that shouldn’t be neglected or abandoned in a town: a slum, or a vacant lot, an alley, or a dump. And that translates, often in fact, into any position of disfavor, in a political or corporate context – a no man’s land. We’ve all been there. We’ve been lost,... Read more

(Reposting from December 2015) It’s Advent, and the same old lies about Mary are slipping over pulpits and out of parish letters, Christmas cards, public prayers, TV holiday movies, and late night comics’ jokes.The subjugation of Mary, the maligning of her as meek, mild, and mindless, has been harmful to millions of women over many centuries.Hiding within the wonder of Christmas are a thousand years of doctrinal female subjugation, doctrines that, like tinsel, are dripped all over the season of... Read more

A Careful Reading of the Biblical Texts  DECEMBER 3, 2015 BY NANCY ROCKWELL It’s Advent, and the same old lies about Mary are slipping over pulpits and out of parish letters, Christmas cards, public prayers, TV holiday movies, and late night comics’ jokes.The subjugation of Mary, the maligning of her as meek, mild, and mindless, has been harmful to millions of women over many centuries.Hiding within the wonder of Christmas are a thousand years of doctrinal female subjugation, doctrines that, like tinsel,... Read more

The Advent Ice Bucket Challenge Sobering News from the Wilderness Confession. It’s a ghastly business in our culture. It’s like pouring a bucket of ice water over your own head. And it’s something the powerful and the criminal squander wealth and power to avoid doing. Think of all those NCIS shows, in which a team of able detectives, armed with the latest technology and forensic investigation, use their experience, their talented noses for smelling rats, their valor and fitness for... Read more

The Answer is Not a Return to the Old Narrowmindedness about Sex It isn’t as though Jesus ever recommended marriage to anyone. In fact – he didn’t. And it isn’t as if Jesus went around applauding couples for fifty years of marriage. Or forty. Thirty. Twenty-five.  Five. Even one. No, he did not. There’ve been so many times, over long years, when brides and grooms have urged me to read ‘the marriage texts’, instead of the few oldies about love... Read more

These Times, Are These Advent Times? Where Will the Word Be Found? Keep awake . . . for you do not know when the time will come . . . When the Great Wheel of Time turns, and the Church begins a new year, there is always this warning, held within this hopefulness. What could be more hopeful than anticipation of a new dawning? And what could be more fearful? Both of these anticipations are held within the start of the... Read more

A Beautiful Kingdom Vision The Banishment of the Unjust The Gospel Year ends now, in a guttering of dry brown leaves, in the harsher winds that warn of winter, in the gathering dark of the year. The Gospel, though, does not let time fade away into the shadows at hand. In a flash of light , behold the vision: the beautiful dream of justice and joy is held up in the two hands of Christ. On Christ’s right hand is... Read more

We Are All Explorers, and Doctrines Cannot Be Our Guide Sola Fide On November 1, All Saints Day, it will be 500 years since Martin Luther began his effective works of destruction, splitting the thousand-year-old Roman Catholic Church in two, by assigning Pinocchio’s, or labels of untruth, to many of its doctrines, on the basis of his studies of the Bible, and especially the Gospels. Luther was a professor of New Testament, and an Augustinian monk, who lived in the... Read more

Entangled Relationships, Confused Desires How a Twitter Hashtag has Opened Up Women’s Humiliation at Work How Jesus Hangs ‘All the Law and the Prophets’ on Loving Your Neighbor Ronan Farrow, the son of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen, wrote the New Yorker article that broke the Harvey Weinstein story, after years of rumors and a number of lawsuits settled out of court. Farrow was assigned the Weinstein story by the New Yorker’s editors. Which may seem odd because he is... Read more