What's Tony Thinking

Biden, Love in Particular and English Majors

March 2, 2023 — Biden in 2024? Jill Biden says that her husband doesn’t feel the “job is done,” which is about as clear a signal that he’s running again in 2024 as we’re likely to get until he says it himself. As I’ve noted here before, I and most everyone I talk to have been agreed he shouldn’t... Read More

Being Transfigured, 2: Transfiguring Death

February 28, 2023 — I thought last night’s session of “Being Transfigured” was quite rich. Here’s the video recording of the session if you would like to take it in. The essence of Green’s chapter is that Christ died, really died. Not a time when he was busy “harrowing hell” or in some limbo state until resurrection. He quoted... Read More

How Worried Should We Be About “Christian Nationalism”?

February 25, 2023 — In her recent article in The New Republic, journalist Katherine Stewart says that the focus on the “rise of the Nones” as the big story in American religion misses what’s really going on. Religion in America, according to Stewart, is in a one of its times of a great transformation, like the Great Awakening of the 18th century... Read More

A Centering, Calming, Prayer

February 23, 2023 — Reader Austin Chinault shared this centering prayer written by Edwina Gateley. Of it, Austin wrote, “it brings me home every time I meditate upon it on my walk around the pond.” Be silent. Be still. Wait before your God… Say nothing. Ask nothing. Be still… Let your God look upon you… That is all. God... Read More

For Lent: Listening

February 21, 2023 — A blessed Ash Wednesday and season of Lent to you all. As the old English word lent signifies the days, in the Northern Hemisphere, are indeed lengthening. Praise God! I’m thinking that for this Lent my spiritual practice will be listening. This is inspired by the first session of the current Crackers and Grape Juice webinar, based... Read More

“The Science”

February 21, 2023 — Our book group started a new series on Climate Science the other evening. We had a choice of two books. I chose Unsettled by Steven E. Koonin, a Cal Tech physicist who had been the Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy in the Obama Administration. The book was a surprise to me. I had... Read More

Something’s Happening Here

February 20, 2023 — Over the weekend I read two posts about the revival going on at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. It began February 8 and has been continuous since then. And I mean, really continuous, 24/7. Here’s a moving post from the Free Press. That story begins with a young man named Gracie Turner, a student at Asbury.... Read More

Mass Shootings: Asking Deeper Questions

February 15, 2023 — Does the current, if temporary, status of abortion suggest a solution, of sorts, on guns? The abortion “solution” has, in effect, been to return the matter to the states to decide. We now have a checkerboard of different laws, varying state to state. In my outrage and frustration with gun violence, I wonder if we... Read More

Love Never Ends

February 14, 2023 — On more than one occasion over the years I have “explained” to couples and congregations that Paul’s “hymn to love,” I Corinthians 13, is not really about romantic love or the love between two people at all. It is, I pointed out, about the absence of love in a church. Paul wrote to a congregation,... Read More

Jesus or “He Gets Us” Goes to the Super Bowl

February 12, 2023 — I first wrote about the “He Gets Us” Campaign last fall when it began to show up during the baseball playoffs. Any other year, I would have missed the ads, since the Seattle Mariners hadn’t been in the playoffs for 21 years. But because they finally ended the playoff drought last fall I saw the... Read More

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