Here’s the latest edition of “The Weekend Wanderer”. Enjoy news and essays on faith and culture with Lamin Sanneh, the pastor who helped Cyntoia Brown, Mr. Rogers, David Brooks, and so much more.

There was that time I tried to use reverse psychology with college students on prayer and various other spiritual practices.

Going through a box of old sermon files that date back to my first days in vocational ministry. I’m thankful people survived my sermons in those days!

This came right out of my journal from earlier in this past year (with slight revisions): “Notes on the Crisis of Pastoral Leadership in the North American Church”.

I resonated with this excerpt from Dallas Willard’s Renovation of the Heart on the gaps and possibilities of personal spiritual transformation, particularly for pastors.

We had a wonderful time at the @EastbrookChurch Student Ministry Winter Retreat talking about the good life, distraction, and undivided hearts with Christ. The only downside of doing this is that I almost always come back sick. This year’s variety: cold with cough.

The latest edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here. Enjoy articles on diverse theologians to read, the tech-wise family, Jerry Falwell, Alan Jacobs on Merton, online Dante, and much more.

Pulling together concepts from Nicholas Carr, Alan Jacobs, Erling Kagge, Christopher Blum, Joshua Hochschild, Dallas Willard, Andy Crouch, Albert Borgmann, Tony Reinke, and so much more for these messages. This is way too much fun!

I appreciate your prayer support as I finalize four messages on living with undivided hearts in a distracted age for the @EastbrookChurch student ministry retreat this weekend, as well as initial work on upcoming messages for our new series “Name Above All Names.” Thank you!

I’m working on a series of four messages for the @EastbrookChurch student ministry retreat this weekend on developing undivided hearts in an age of distraction. Now, if only I could maintain focus and not become so distracted in my preparations!

The latest edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here with John Wesley on preaching, Iranian conversions in Turkey, evangelicals of color & the religious right, persecuted Christians, and so much more.

My final blog post on Eugene Peterson’s outstanding book on pastoral ministry, Working the Angles: “Practicing Spiritual Direction.”

Apocalyptic Christ: a poem.

An Advent Prayer of St. Augustine of Hippo.

The latest edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here with Fleming Rutledge, #ChurchToo, pressure on Chinese churches, why internet church isn’t real church, and so much more.

When studying yesterday I came across these powerful reflections by John Oswalt on Isaiah 9 related to Jesus’ wholistic mission and the Church.

I appreciate your prayer support today as I continue working on messages for this coming weekend of Advent on Daniel 12, Christmas Eve services, and a Student Ministry retreat in January on having undivided hearts. @EastbrookChurch

In light of preaching from Daniel’s apocalyptic visions during Advent, I couldn’t agree more with Fleming Rutledge in “Why Apocalypse Is Essential to Advent”.

Wendell Berry on the wisdom of simplicity from The Hidden Wound.

The December 15, 2019, edition of “The Weekend Wanderer” is here with gospel music and worship wars, Facebook’s maformation of our lives, Asher Imtiaz, Stephen Colbert’s conversion story, books, and more.

Spiritual direction is the task of helping a person take seriously what is treated dismissively by the publicity-infatuated and crisis-sated mind, and then to receive this “mixed random material of life”…as the raw material for high holiness.”

Eugene Peterson on spiritual direction in Working the Angles. More on that here as part of my ongoing posts as I read through that book.

There are a lot of albums that I return to often, but one of the constants is Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks. The whole thing is a delight, and I never tire of “On the Nature of Daylight.”

I’m continuing my reflections on Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles at my blog with attention to Peterson’s call for pastors to serve as spiritual directors.

Josef Pieper: > The prerequisite for justice is truth. Whoever rejects the truth, whether natural or supernatural, is at that point truly “evil” and unrepentant.

A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart, p. 21.

I spent a lot of time this past week thinking about imagination and its relation to faith. It eventually became the first part of my message on Daniel 9, which I slightly re-worked here: “A Faith-full Imagination”.