The Trinity and the Day of Pentecost
Spirit of pentecost sermon slides Acts 2:1-21 from Steve Thomason When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. I’ve heard that expression used to describe how teachers can manipulate any text to fit their own theological agenda. I have to admit that the...Article | A Trinitarian Perspective on Christian Spirituality by Mark McIntosh
Mark McIntosh’s work is important to my research. He has done an incredible job of connecting Trinitarian theology to spirituality. This is obviously important to my research question in which I ask how an increased awareness of social Trinity might impact...
Sketches of Pentecost | Thinking about this Weekend’s Sermon
I will be preaching about Pentecost this weekend. The two texts are Acts 2:1-21 and Philippians 4:4-7. The passages don’t normally go together, but the Narrative Lectionary has taken us into Philippians for the past two weeks and then jerked us all the way back...My Reflections on “The Decision” at Grace
This essay is a personal reflection on the decision made by the Vision Board on May 13 to permit same-sex marriages to be held at Grace and the new reality that we live in as a congregation in the wake of that decision. I must confess, up front, that I am still in...
My First Oil Painting in Years
For some reason I haven’t done any actual oil painting since we moved to Minnesota. I took one day during my vacation and did a quick oil of the Double Arch in Arches National Park. I based this on a photograph we took several years ago. This is done on a...Thinking about Suburban Spirituality
I decided to read The Blackwell Companion to Christian Spirituality. It has occured to me that I have become bogged down in the epistemological concerns section of the dissertation and have not attended well to the actual core of my research, which is the topic of...Read moreSandra Schneiders defines spirituality as the ‘experience of conscious involvement in the project of life-integration through self-transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives,’ which for Christians is the triune God revealed in Jesus, approached via the paschal mystery and the church community and lived through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Her understanding implies the radical capacity of the human spirit to engage God’s Spirit and the importance of Scripture to mediate the foundational revelation and to supply the basic symbol system into which each individual and communal Christian story is integrated ((Schneiders, Sandra. “The Study of Christian Spirituality: Contours and dynamics of a Discipline” Christian Spirituality Bulletin. 6(1). 1998. 1, 3-21.)) Christian spirituality begins as Jesus, steeped in the rich Jewish tradition of divine self-disclosure, interacts with those who respond to him; and that experience is converted into language and shared with others.
