Sublime

The more resources, the more you were engaged; and the more you were engaged, the more viable this spirituality was within the nova effect. It could provide meaning, shape your passages through time, and help your ordinary life be one of individually experienced flourishing. As Mark Chaves has shown, churches in America are polarized in the sense o

shifting the operative frame of the American Jewish experience from one of institutional preservation to one of communal empowerment.

The evangelists, in their editorial notes, sometimes highlight the fact that in first-century terms the main thing that would be ‘seen’ in the mighty works was not a supernatural display of power for its own sake but the coming of Israel’s god in power to save and heal, to do for these individuals what had been promised (it was thought) to the nati

We live in a time—call it a secular age—when society has devalued the pastor and yet we nevertheless yearn for ministry.

soul. Poetic imagery is also compressed information. Less can lead to more, if my words draw out what you and a circle of women together have as collective wisdom.

The way that this modern moral order takes shape around chosen identity makes it complicated for pastors. If the church or the pastor tries too hard to shape a person’s life, it will be a violation of the modern moral order.

Covenantal living is intergenerational living—it is to know oneself as the descendant of ancestors and the ancestor of descendants, all sharing a dream of a world in which human dignity is real and the presence of God is manifest (more on this dream in chapter 12).