Too often, people try to reduce Revelation to a riddle to be solved, as though the beasts and bowls, trumpets and thrones could be decoded into a neat timeline. To be sure, apocalyptic language has a logic to it—a symbolic grammar that can and should be studied, much like one might analyze poetry or music. Understanding the meaning of those symbols is part of engaging the text; in some ways, Revelation is like a puzzle. But it can’t stop there. Once you’ve “figured it out,” you don’t simply close the book, heave a sigh of intellectual satisfaction, and move on. To do so would be like pulling apart the pieces…
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The God Who Mugs You
God scoffs at religious superiority; he wants his people to love him and their neighbors. When a Muslim or a Buddhist or an atheist suspicious of or even antagonistic to the Church lives out a better example of Christ’s life than a Christian does, the Christian is freed to recognize the face of Jesus Christ along with Jacob and admit in wonder that “I have seen your face like seeing the face of God."
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Bob Dylan at 80: The Ship Never Came In … And That’s OK
On October 26th, 1963, Bob Dylan performed “The Times, They Are A-Changin’” for the first time in New York’s Carnegie Hall. “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Blowin’ in the Wind” were also in the set. And he closed with “When the Ship Comes In,” a song he had performed with Joan Baez only a few months earlier at the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. would later deliver his “I Have a Dream” speech. Something was happening and Dylan was right in the midst of it.
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‘Hamlet’ as Lenten Fare
It has been a hard winter in lots of ways, and my spiritual life is not immune to the toll the virus took. That said, one upside of the interruption is that I have made an unlikely substitution for what would have been conventional devotional reading in a more typical year: Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
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Concerning Humility
When I was eight, I saw the photo of Muhammad Ali delivering the knockout to Sonny Liston. I was awestruck. The next Saturday, when I was lucky enough to win my little league wrestling match, I tried to replicate Ali’s pose. My parents called me up to the bleachers and I received an early lesson in humility.
