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Mirriam-Webster’s dictionary defines Mea culpa as meaning “‘through my fault’ in Latin, [which] comes from a prayer of confession in the Catholic Church. Said by itself, it’s an exclamation of apology or remorse that is used to mean ‘It was my fault’ or ‘I apologize.’” 

So what do I have to apologize for? Well, nothing really. And why might that be? Because there’s method to my madness.

Specifically, I’m referring to my tendency to look at social and theological problems rather than what some might consider more uplifting themes. The glass is always half-empty. It’s negative, not positive. And it’s depressing too.

Back when I was in divinity school I took a second master’s degree in pastoral counseling. I thought that was what I wanted to do. But after 2 or 3 years serving a church, I decided that the church was where I belonged.

Continue reading “Apologia”

In 2011, a new twist to the standard murder mystery emerged. The television show that started it all was “The Killing,” a Danish production. A plethora of shows later copied its wild success. The genre today is known as “Nordic noir” or “Scandinavian noir” or, in abbreviated form, “Scandi noir.”

The shows all have an easily identifiable quality. The landscapes are unrelentingly bleak and the mood dark and morally complex. Underneath the still, placid settled-ness of Nordic culture lurks untold evils, ready to pounce at any moment, producing an unnerving, eerie sort of suspense.

The language is spare, the pacing slow and anguished. The characters appear world-weary, drained of feeling. It’s as if they’re just going through the motions, while external forces draw them inexorably towards an unknown but stealthy oblivion. All human interactions are muted, if not utterly joyless. They walk through an inhospitable and unforgiving world as if zombies.

Continue reading “Scandi Noir and the Charm of Disenchantment”

My father used to relate the story with considerable affection and humor. The date was Sunday, December 7, 1941, otherwise known as the “day of infamy.” Pearl Harbor Day. My father’s mother called her two sisters in Bethlehem, PA to tell them her husband, my grandfather, had died suddenly of a heart attack in Virginia. He had been scheduled to preach that morning at the dedication of a new church.

Aunt Lucy, my great-aunt, received the news somberly, and then offered this memorable gem, a line that lives on in family lore: “Oh dear,” she sighed heavily, “the cat died today too!”

Nothing like keeping things in perspective. God bless her.

My grandfather is pictured above, a photograph from the cover of the Messenger, the flagship publication of the Evangelical and Reformed Church (now part of the U.C.C.).

Continue reading “Acts 6”

I know what you’re thinking. This post is about the recent “Varsity Blues” scandal involving wealthy parents (including at least a few Hollywood stars) bribing elite colleges and universities to admit their children.

But it’s not about that, really.

It’s not even about the broader scandal of college admissions in general (such as race-based and legacy admissions) or the scandal of easy access to federal loan money which not only has left countless students with crushing debt, but has led to steep increases in tuition (well above the cost of living) and directly abetted the vast expansion of campus building projects and high-end amenities (in order to compete with other colleges similarly flush with this same loan money). And don’t get me started on the consequent and exponential increases in staff and faculty!

The real scandal, I would submit, is how colleges and universities have all but lost their original purpose, their very reason for being.

Continue reading “College Scandals”

For decades I’ve listened to well-meaning people in the church (mostly pastors) tell me we need to change. Change, change, change. It’s all the rage, I tell you. And it’s presented as if it’s pretty much the solution to all that ails us.

And what is it that ails us? The implosion of the Protestant mainline church, for one. As these churches have struggled for decades with diminished numbers, stressed budgets, and an increasing loss of public relevance, the default solution is…change.

Often such change is foisted on long-standing church members who aren’t quite sure what all this change-talk is really about.

Years ago, I served as interim pastor at a historic downtown church. As the fortunes of the city declined over the years, as people fled in great numbers to the suburbs, and as the weed of secularism spread its tentacles over ever-larger swathes of America, the church was struggling.

Continue reading “Cut Flowers and Mighty Oaks”

G.K. Chesterton, referencing the Modernist era, once said: “A madman is not someone who has lost his reason but someone who has lost everything but his reason.”

As you may recall, Modernism, beginning with the Enlightenment, sought to replace tradition with Reason. All human problems would thus be fixed. Me thinks Chesterton was on to something.

Today we live in a bifurcated culture. One might even call it schizophrenic. Which is to say there exists two camps where never the twain shall meet: socialism and capitalism. Both, believe it or not, are kissing cousins.

Capitalism, in a generalized sense, is the Enlightenment’s idea of the free market which sought to empower the individual over and against the feudal system of land owner and serf.

Continue reading “The Empty Shrine”

It was an old farmhouse, probably from the early 19^th century, the road it was set upon then somewhat busier, yet still maintaining a relative quiet. It was there that I would visit one of our oldest church members.

We’d sit in his living room, its furnishings largely untouched for 50 years or so. There he’d talk about olden times, not in a breathless, impatient fashion, but thoughtfully and perceptively. All of life’s bumps and rough edges had been smoothed over by the ensuing years, replaced by perspective, the calm inscrutable wisdom born of time.

When my wife and I first met, we discovered we had something a bit unusual in common. We both were drawn to older people. When I was a kid, in fact, and at a social gathering, I’d invariably find myself talking to the older folk. Linda said she’d done the same thing as a child.

I’ve always thought this attraction is because older people are far less apt to play games. They have nothing to prove. They don’t need to show off or command anybody’s attention. They’ve seen life in all its varying forms. Nothing is wholly new. They are witness to the vast expanse of life. In essence, they’ve leaned to simply be.

Continue reading “The Future of Permanence”

Fresh with a mostly useless degree in American history and without a clue as to what to do with the rest of my life, I took a job in a gritty factory town just west of Chicago working at a sheltered workshop for retarded adults. Today we’d call them the developmentally challenged.

I was a supervisor for a small group of “clients,” maybe a dozen or so, whose job was to count out 10 plastic picks and bundle them with rubber bands. To this day I don’t know who these bundles were for and thus why we needed to bundle them, but that was what we did.

I learned a lot from the clients. They were like children except that they weren’t. They certainly had their challenges, ones we “normals” typically don’t have, but there was something truly compelling and, indeed, attractive about them.

For one thing, they were real.

Continue reading “The Scandal of the Particular”

It’s been a while, so the specifics are a bit vague, but I can tell you it was plush, believe you me.

I’m referring to the “classroom” where we met one fine day in the office of the “master” of one of Yale’s fourteen residential colleges. (“Master,” I’ll have you know, was recently changed to “head of college,” to accord with the current fashions of political correctness.)

Normally, the class was held up Prospect Hill, at the divinity school, but on this particular day we were treated to the master’s palatial digs. It was opulent in that understated, clubby way – stuffed chairs and muted academic tones, as if a Hollywood set. Cigars and snifters of brandy would not have been out of place.

The occasion was a lecture by an acquaintance of our professor’s, a gentlemanly psychiatrist hailing from Lima, Peru. For the full hour, we were granted entry into the appalling conditions found within the slums of Lima. It sounded truly horrific, and I have no doubt what he reported was accurate, if not insufficient in describing the human tragedy born of such degradation.

Continue reading “The Slums of Lima”

In the opening scene from the 1993 movie, Shadowlands, we see C.S. Lewis (played by Anthony Hopkins) lecturing students at Cambridge University (UK).

A lapsed Christian and onetime atheist, Lewis returned to the faith at the age of 32 while teaching at Oxford. He went on to become the greatest Christian apologist of the 20^th century.

At the start of the movie, Lewis is lecturing his students on Christian doctrine concerning death and eternal life. His tone is authoritative and confident, his words reassuring and redolent of orthodox, New Testament beliefs.

Later in the film he meets an American, Joy Davidman Gresham, whom he married in 1956. Four short years later, however, in 1960, she had died of cancer. Lewis’ experience of this loss eventually inspired the book, “A Grief Observed,” a classic in bereavement studies.

Continue reading “The Cost of Discipleship”