Sublime

Do we love God and others enough to drop the pretense and just be ourselves? Only the gospel simultaneously provides the humility and the confidence the pastor needs to be his real self. The pastorate is no place for image-managing, for worrying about our own PR. In any event, if everybody likes you, something’s wrong, and if everybody hates you, s

daily encounters large and small, we are challenged to remember that our animating commitment is to love others, and that our personal mandate is to grow in love.

First, it should present a positive agenda, not just a tool of critique. It will not just analyze contemporary society but provide a vision for its future flourishing and renewal. Second, it will present a challenge to customary and fashionable of thinking. It will not merely take whatever happens to be the current flavor of the month in intellectu

Pastors need to be ethnographers of the everyday, helping parishioners see their own environment as one that is formative, and all too often deformative. The pastor will sometimes be like the old fish in Wallace’s parable, regularly asking us, “How’s the water?” Eventually we learn: “Oh, this is water.”

“In the face of recent revelations about the reckless and self-indulgent sexual conduct of so many of our elected officials, it may be worth recalling that sexual restraint rather than sexual prowess was once the measure of a man.”33