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God's Trinity and Our Trials

 The following is an adaptation of the sermon I preached on Trinity Sunday 2024. One of my refrains during that service was that clergy can be wrong. I stated this as a way to introduce one of the functions of reciting Creeds during our liturgy (as a corrective to any wayward points in a sermon). It just so happened that I feel like I whiffed on my sermon and left out any major connection to Jesus Christ (yikes!). So me writing and posting this is an opportunity to amend my words. The 20th century theologian Karl Barth is reported to have said that an exegete or preacher must prepare his sermon with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Following this advice, in preparation for my sermon on the doctrine of God's Trinity, which was to draw primarily on Moses' encounter with God at the Burning Bush, I decided to search the internet to see how people were hearing/interacting with this revelation of God. In doing so I stumbled upon the following quote from a contemp...
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The Tale of Four Temples

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     The lectionary readings assigned for the third Sunday in Lent, year B, in the Book of Common Prayer (2019)  pairs Exodus 20:1-21 and John 2:13-22. The Exodus reading relates the giving of the Ten Commandments to the people of Israel from Mount Sinai, while John 2 tells us of Jesus' cleansing of the temple. While it may appear that these passages have little to do with one another, a thread that ties them together is that of temple. Explicitly and implicitly, four temples are present in these readings: the temple in Jerusalem, the temple of Jesus' body, the temple of Mount Sinai, and the temple of Mount Moriah.
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The Journey Toward Proverbs 8

Big news! I've signed a contract to publish my dissertation in the Princeton Theological Monograph series. This is exciting because it means more people can interact with my work and sharpen it through critique and (hopefully) encouragement. The book's tentative title is Wisdom in the World: Toward a Renewed Christian Reading of Proverbs 8 .      As part of the publishing process I'm encouraged to think about why I started working on this project.
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Job 28 and Pastoral Formation

Below is an address that I delivered in May of 2018 at a gathering of alumni of Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, PA.
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Alasdair MacIntyre & Charles Taylor Against Modern Epistemology

Alasdair MacIntyre’s Gifford Lectures were delivered between 1987 and 1988, and he published the lectures as Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry in 1990. [1]   The book shares the similar concern of Charles Taylor regarding epistemology; that the dominant model of knowing is Cartesian and encyclopedic (to use MacIntyre’s term) and does not do justice to the complexity of the world nor of the human knowing subject.
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Rowan Williams & Charles Taylor on a Multicultural Society

Rowan Williams, formerly Archbishop of Canterbury, serves as   Honorary Professor of Contemporary Christian Thought for Magdalene College, Cambridge.   In his book    Faith in The Public Square , which is a collection of  lectures and essays, Williams seeks to address a similar set of concerns to those of Charles Taylor .   The twenty-six essays in William's book address various issues.   However, present through many of them is the concern for a society which can accommodate a plurality of cultures and religions.
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Faith for the Health of Secularism

Without a robust public square which includes, rather than excludes explicitly religious convictions, "the liberal ideal becomes deeply anti-humanist.  And, like it or not, we need a theology to arrest this degeneration" (36).  Last night, I read through the remaining five chapters of the first section in Rowan Williams' book, Faith in the Public Square .  Though these chapters address a diverse array of topics, a theme emerges that religious faith is a needed component for a healthy secular society.
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