If you can name your great-great grandparents, you are a part of a tiny minority of Americans. If you can go beyond that, you are in a category sociologists can rarely identify. But go into other parts of the world and the line of one’s ancestry is clear. Many non-Western…

“For the Germans…I think that remorse is pointless…I feel sure that they won’t earn the forgiveness they could get form the world just by being obligingly repentant. They will earn it rather by total, sincere commitment to a future…” — Jean-Paul Sartre, “For the Germans,” article originally published in Verger…

You cannot talk about Christmas without talking about childbirth. For as much as Christians have tried to clean up the Nativity, it’s impossible to tell the story honestly and get past the fact that the way the whole Christianity thing began was with a woman giving birth in a barn—or…

“Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing…

“Where are we going up?” -Deuteronomy 1:28 “And a scribe came up and said to him, “Teacher, I will follow you wherever you go.” -Matthew 8:19 “Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart. Audacious longing, burning songs, daring thoughts, an impulse overwhelming…

“Holy Week” refers to the seven days before Easter Sunday. The word “holy” literally means “set apart.” For centuries, Christians all over the world have marked out a full week to contemplate the cross and the resurrection. At Awakening, we desire to “set apart” this week for the prayerful consideration…

“You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever…To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.” -C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man The line between a useful conversation and a useless one can be quite thin. Right when we think we’re helping a friend problem-solve, we…

There is nowhere God is not. His presence permeates this world in a way that none of us can grasp, even as the finer theological minds have attempted to do so: Willard says we live in a “God-bathed world;” Sonderegger says God cannot be “located…as an object,” but instead lives…

“I can’t use anything from it,” he said. We were driving to a retreat together, maybe five years ago now. Brad (not his real name) was a youth pastor who had invited me out to speak for his group when we got talking about what books we were reading. We…