On the second Sunday of Advent we anticipate and celebrate the promise that Jesus, the Prince of Peace, has come to bring peace into the world. In the face of so much hubris, greed, polarization, division, and war around the globe, the promise of peace might seem a distant and elusive dream.

In Churchland there is a natural tendency to look to churches that appear successful, hoping to learn from or emulate what they are doing in our own communities.

“My soul longs, indeed, it faints for the courts of the Lord”

Psalm 84 is a psalm of longing or lament, and it is also a psalm of pilgrimage. Three times a year the people were commanded to make a pilgrimage to the temple to appear before the Lord (Exodus 23:14–17).

I’ll be retiring next summer.  People ask me “why now?”.  Lots of reasons, probably: let someone younger have a place at the faculty table; family responsibilities; health; fatigue; out of synch with the culture; “work is done,” “new things to do,” generational stage of life; and so on.

At the beginning of March, the Angus Reid Institute ran a poll surveying those who were anticipating a return to work. The poll revealed that after two years of working at home many employees aren’t sure that they want to return to the office.

The following comments were transcribed from opening remarks by Professor Ephraim Radner delivered at Morning Prayer in the Wycliffe College Founder’s Chapel, on Thursday, Dece

This blog post is the first in a series, in which Wycliffe theology professors consider the COVID vaccination debate. In the following, Ephraim Radner, Professor of Historical Theology asks, “How did the issue of vaccination so divide the church?”

“What is God’s call for my life?” That is a question most Christians think about at one time or another and it is certainly one of the questions we have in the back of our minds when we come to a college or seminary like Wycliffe—regardless of whether we are looking towards possible ordination/pa

My wife Annette and I own several charcoal and wash drawings by a wonderful artist, Churchill Davenport. We acquired them when we were married in the late 1980’s.

The ventilator may well come to be one of the sorrowful symbols of the time of the Virus. We will associate it, as even now we do, with intense suffering, loss, and even death.

There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

In his inaugural speech as president of the United States (March 4, 1933) Franklin Roosevelt began by saying “let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is ... fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror…” 

In the midst of this present crisis one of the greatest gifts the church has for the world is prayer. Not prayer as a way of retreating from, or turning away from, the world, but prayer as means of being more present to the world in the midst of this crisis. In prayer, in worship, we begin with w

Who should you listen to?  Who do you trust to learn something from?  These are important questions for students, obviously.

I often tell my doctoral students that if they have an outside job of more than 10 to 15 hours per week, the chances are that their dissertation will be the worse for it, or that it might not get done at all. Experience seems to confirm this advice. But not always.

“The soul watered by sacred Scripture grows fat and bears fruit in due season, which is the orthodox faith, and so is it adorned with its evergreen leaves, with actions pleasing to God, I mean.” – John of Damascus (The Orthodox Faith, 4:17) as quoted in

Life is hard for most people. Not just for a moment, or in moments—an illness, a lost job, a death of someone we love. Rather, life is hard in a continuous way, as a kind of passage over time. To get from birth to death is difficult. 

Chris Wright, a biblical scholar and the International Ministries Director of Langham Partnership, has suggested that the great commission in Matthew 28:19, 20 is not so much a mandate to go to the far corners of the earth as it is about making disciples and baptizing wherever we are.

I once heard a priest address a congregation with a question: “What is the complaint I hear most from parents?” Then he answered it by saying: “they lament the fact that their grown children have stopped going to church.”  The priest went on: “Do you know what I tell them?