memento vivere

What would life be like if we were always ready to die? If wisdom is at all to be desired, then regular, if not frequent, consideration of...

What is salvation? One thing it is not is a form of postmortem fire insurance—a get out of jail free card assuring us that because we said a prayer or filled out a card or “gave our lives to Jesus” in some moment of crisis we are hereby and forevermore spared from the fires of hell. Salvation, according to 1 Corinthians 1:18, is a process. As Paul wrote, “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power . . .

A number of weeks ago, I described how I went from being an atheist to a mildly fundamentalistic non-denominational evangelical missionary. The question now is, what drew me from conservative non-denominationalism to the Episcopal Church? I should begin by defining my terms. By “fundamentalistic” I mean believing in the supremacy and inerrancy of the Bible. [NB: Not all evangelicals are fundamentalists, and many evangelicals regard “fundamentalist” to be a pejorative term. By

Last week, I shared how around age 13 I became an atheist and that the intellectual justification for my de-conversion was the problem of suffering and evil. In early high school, I endured a traumatic experience, which gave me a deep emotional reason for rejecting God—but I won’t go into that here. As I also shared, music (and especially the pursuit of a successful musical career) was my god. One reason for this (if René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire carries any weight)

Since the beginning of my rectorship, a number of folks have asked for more details about my conversion to Christianity, so the thought occurred to me: why not put it in writing? The story begins with my de-conversion. I sometimes forget that I was born a Quaker. My earliest memories of church are of gatherings of the Society of Friends in a small house just northwest of downtown Houston, TX. (It’s where I had my first taste of pumpkin pie.) Around my fifth birthday, my paren

It is perhaps a miracle that, throughout the nearly twenty-eight years I lived in Texas, I never saw a rattlesnake in the wild. I had to go to upstate New York to experience the thrill. During the two weeks that we were away from the parish, Emily, the girls, and I spent several days on Lake George in the Adirondacks. On our last day there, I decided to go for one more hike and prepared to set out alone on a trail leading to the top of a cliff overlooking the lake. Wisely rem