This morning I was reading through the book of Job. I think it is safe to assume that anyone who has been in the church for any amount of time could tell you the theme of Job. Even if the only word that came from their lips was ‘suffering,’ they would have pretty much hit the nail on the head. But, the fuller picture for this book, and this is important for my reflection today, is that Job was a righteous man, and yet still he suffered. At the very beginning of Job, before all the bad stuff starts happening to him (so really within the first 6 verses of the book), the author is trying to make ..read more

Have you ever said to yourself, “I just don’t feel like doing [fill in the blank] right now,” even though you know it’s the right thing to do? I think if we are being honest, most of us say some version of the above to ourselves often. This experience of knowing you should do something, but are having a hard time being motivated, is an ancient one. It goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks and was adopted into the way Christians think about the tension between what we feel, and what we know we should do. This tension comes out in the way these thinkers have talked about the soul. Bas ..read more

This past week I was contacted by the youth ministry officer for Episcopal Church Faith Formation at the national church to write a short reflection for high schoolers on peace and the current violence in the middle east. Myself and a few priests/pastors from a varieties of denominations of Palestinian, Israeli, and Lebanese backgrounds (I was the resident Armenian) we asked to write a reflection a day over. Below is my contribution to ‘The Way of Peace’ for d365. Scripture: John 14:27 “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your he ..read more

Who was St Nicholas? Nicholas was born in the third century in what is now the Southern Coast of Turkey. He was born into a wealthy Christian family. At a young age, Nicholas’ parents died in an epidemic. After his parents’ death, he took the words of Jesus to sell everything and give it to the poor seriously and gave away his entire inheritance to the sick and the suffering, making him well known in the region for his generosity. He had a particular soft spot for children. There is a famous story of Nicholas’ generosity where upon hearing that there was a poor man that could not afford t ..read more

Back in 2022 I became obsessed with a twentieth century historian by the name of Tony Judt. In January of that year I came across an Atlantic article written by a journalist that I respect very much, and upon reading this article I immediately thought that Judt was someone I should check out. The first book of his that I read was a series of essays that had been published over many years before his death of ALS in 2010. I was immediately hooked. Throughout 2022 I read (without exaggeration) thousands of pages of his work. (I think Charissa became quite annoyed with me always talking about him ..read more

There are things in life that are easy to ignore; easy to not think of in our day to day lives. Psychologist Daniel Kahnemann makes a distinction between what he calls thinking fast and thinking slow. Fast thinking includes all of the operations of the brain that happen without us thinking about; like breathing or determining distance. Thinking slow is more discursive. It includes those activities that we have to consciously think about. Something has to disrupt our lives and circumstances for our fast thinking to become slow thinking. A way of thinking about this, thought his is a bit of stre ..read more

Holidays are a time for family. But how we think about family as Christians is a little bit different than that of the world.   The account of the family given in scripture, which I will here limit to the New Testament, extends beyond the biological into the spiritual. Family is concerned with the spiritual relationship between individuals as part of the wider ‘family of God.’ In the New Testament, “scriptural language is often used to refer to the church (Gal. 6:10; Eph. 2:19), and throughout Scripture the family is a key metaphor for the family of God or the household of faith.” It is t ..read more

Have you ever said to yourself, “I just don’t feel like doing [fill in the blank] right now,” even though you know it’s the right thing to do? I think if we are being honest, most of us say some version of the above to ourselves often. This experience of knowing you should do something, but are having a hard time being motivated, is an ancient one. It goes back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks and was adopted into the way Christians think about the tension between what we feel, and what we know we should do. This tension comes out in the way these thinkers have talked about the soul. Bas ..read more

Sundays are an important day in the life of a Christian. Though, like many other things in our lives, this holy day can often just seem familiar. But, there is actually something that we can learn about Sundays during this time in Lent. It is not totally true that the feast of Easter is once a year. Sure there is the major feast that takes place at the end of Lent, but technically, within the tradition, every Sunday is a little Easter. Every Sunday, no matter where in the liturgical year, is an Easter celebration. So let me point something out to you that perhaps you have never noticed, or pe ..read more

Starting this Sunday our gospel readings for Sunday mornings will be the portion of the sermon on the mount from Matthew 5. This is a really beautiful passage about what it means to live in community and what discipleship looks like. But there is one really important aspect of discipleship that I cannot get into in our Sunday morning homilies. I have talked about this before, but one of the overlooked aspect of life that really contributes to spiritual growth and discipleship is friendship. So, for the next few week’s reflections, I want to tease out what this might mean for us. I want to star ..read more