In today’s gospel passage, Jesus speaks in parables. Again. He does that a lot. Jesus frequently uses this particular literary device to get his point across. And in this passage from Mark’s gospel, we hear that Jesus preached only in parables, “as they were able to hear.” Parables are brief stories that illustrate a particular…

“Then who can be saved?” they asked Jesus. How often we ask ourselves that very question. Oh, yes, day to day we put on a good face and project an image of confidence to the world around us. Like the man in today’s gospel reading who seeks Jesus to ask how he might inherit eternal…

Sometimes the expanse of centuries between when the scriptures were written and when we, in the twenty-first century, are reading them seems to disappear. The readings today that supposedly come from Wisdom and James couldn’t possibly have been written that long ago. They must have been written in our time – in our generation, or…

What does our culture, our society, tell us about dancing? Does it celebrate it? Does it embrace and expand upon it, helping it to infuse our movements through the world? Does it teach us to inhabit the expressive potential of our bodies, coordinated and rhythmic? Or does it narrow it, relegate it to the back…

In T. S. Eliot’s poem, “The Four Quartets,” he talks about going to a church at Little Gidding, the site of a small Anglican religious community founded in the seventeenth century. Eliot writes, “You are not here to verify, instruct yourself, or inform curiosity or carry report. You are here to kneel where prayer has…