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Showing posts from April, 2018

Review of Echoes of Exodus: Tracing Themes of Redemption through Scripture

                                                           by Alastair Roberts and Andrew Wilson                                                                                                                        Crossway, 2018 This is a fine and helpful book on several fronts. First, the authors offer a lucid and compelling model of scripture as a musical composition. Going into a fair amount of detail (which helped this author to understand because I am musically illiterate), a rich and textured approach to the Bible emerges from their exposition. This model is especially helpful in that handles both the unity of the biblical story and the many different ways that story is told that both unify and at times offer discordant or alternative points of view on aspects of the story. The bulk of the book traces the Exodus theme, the major biblical symbol of redemption through the length and breadth of scripture. I believe the pattern of Exodus to Exile is a macro structuring d

Do You Ever Think About Being A Hobbit?

April 24, 2018 ·  Fr. Stephen Freeman   I stumbled into the Tolkien novels as a teenager (in the 60’s). They were a gift from an Aunt and so collected dust on a shelf for a year or more. A virus turned me into a shut-in for a short season, and I dusted them off out of sheer boredom. I extended my illness for a couple of weeks until the whole series was finished. It was a journey into another world, one that had a way of changing the world I lived in. There were no elves that suddenly appeared nor was there an army of orcs invading my town. But there was an ache that I felt as I read that seemed to match an ache in my life. It took some years to discover the connection. People have told stories from the earliest days of our existence. We do not have the words of the earliest stories, but we have seen their illustrations, recorded on the walls of caves. No one knows what how the stories went, but they seem to involved animals. The beauty of those animals tells us that the stories in

Easter 2018

Sleep eludes me this night forcing me to keep an Easter Vigil I did not choose. I find myself musing on St. Mark’s passion and resurrection story, odd as it is (though terribly characteristic of this gospel writer). One of its oddities is that it is pagan Roman centurion who announces Jesus’ death boldly declaring the last thing I’m sure he ever expected to be saying at that moment, “Truly, this man was God’s Son!” (Mk.15:39). The emperor was believed to be son of deity; yet here it is one pinned to a cross in a humiliating death that is so acclaimed. What did that centurion see in the dying/dead Jesus that evoked such a profession? We’ll never know, of course. And perhaps that’s the point. Against all expectation and probability this death, in all it gruesome horror, spoke to the centurion the last thing he expected to hear: a word of divine love and even victory. I can’t get the words of Paul in 2 Cor.4 out of my mind (especially vv.10-12):  “ But we have this treasure in