Jesus at 2AM - A Humorous, Intelligent Look at the Bible, Church History & the Life of Faith

The central question of Israel’s faith in the first century boiled down to this: What must we do to provoke God to complete his project of salvation? It had been centuries since the temple – destroyed during the Babylonian invasion – had been restored, and yet the glory of God had not returned. Some attempts […]

The “annunciation” to Mary of Jesus’s birth is, at one level, a very gracious encounter between God and a young girl – the divine revelation that, with Mary’s permission, she will be the means through which God’s messiah enters into creation. And it involves one of the great miracles of the biblical story – the pregnancy […]

Luke opens on a darkened scene. Herod, a despotic ruler installed by Rome, sits on David’s throne in Jerusalem – a powerful symbol that Israel is far from where she expected to be. The first character we meet is Zechariah – an aged priest of a childless wife – coming to due his religious duty in the […]

The Apostle Luke is often regarded as an historian. His book, Acts (of the Apostles), is a highly detailed description of the events of the early church, and he describes his “gospel” as a carefully investigated “orderly account” of Jesus’s life. Both are the sort of literature we find in other ancient histories. But Luke’s […]

Love is the name of the game. It is the purpose behind creation, the goal of life and the greatest of all commandments.  In this episode we begin an extensive look at love in practice – love of God, self and other (indeed even of enemy) as displayed in the life of Jesus. Our guide […]

In this conclusion to our study classical Christian spiritual formation, we take all practices we have learned so far and put them together to get a picture of a typical day-in-the-life of one growing to maturity in Christ. What we discover is that the work of spiritual discipline is rarely burdensome nor heroic, and one need […]

A personal trainer for the soul? Every great athlete has a coach, every great artist a teacher, and every great saint a mentor, “confessor” or spiritual director. And while most of us are not striving for formal “sainthood,” we can all benefit from some formal spiritual direction. In this episode we explore the a bit […]

Genuine hardship is an essential part of the work of maturity in the Christian life. And one of the most damaging fallacies of pop-Christianity is that experiences of distance from God, isolation and aridity are signs of regression (or as my tradition so often refers to them: “back-sliding”). One need look no further than to Jesus’s […]

How do you know when God is talking? There are some people who claim to hear the voice of God constantly – in every impulse they have, every chance event or random encounter. And others who have never had an inkling of divine communication. The classical tradition says that neither of these pictures is accurate. It […]

Is it possible to have an unmediated experience of God? A direct encounter with the divine that transcends any use of the senses or even the intellect? The classical answer is –  yes!  And its pursuit is the goal of the mystic tradition (an element of the spiritual life that is accessible to us all, […]