Despite an enormous variety of denominational (and non-denominational) bodies, there is remarkable unity around the praying of the Lord’s Prayer. Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants of all stripes pray this prayer and the prayer is prayed nearly verbatim in all traditions…except for the “forgive us our…” section of the prayer. For some it is “Forgive us […]
Teach Us to Pray: Model Prayer
April 28, 2016 By
Christianity isn’t magic. God’s not a genie. There is no necessary correlation between performing certain religious ceremonies and experiencing good things. If we think about any prayer in this way (including the Lord’s Prayer), we’ve got it all wrong. This is superstition. Perhaps one of the great tragedies of the Lord’s Prayer is that it […]
Teach Us to Pray: Small But Powerful
April 20, 2016 By
One teaspoon of botulinum toxin is enough to kill more than 1 billion human beings (or so the Internet tells me; I’ve never experimented). Some ants can lift as much as 5,000 times their body weight. Small doesn’t mean weak. More of something isn’t always better than less. This is true of prayer. It is […]
Lord, Teach Me To Pray!
April 13, 2016 By
I feel altogether inadequate in my prayer life. I’m a crummy pray-er. I’m highly distractible in prayer (despite being an intensely focused person generally). I’m inconsistent in prayer. I tell people I’ll pray for them, then forget to do so. I fall asleep praying. I start praying, then realize I’m thinking about the Steelers depth […]
Books that Didn’t Make the Cut: The Didache
April 7, 2016 By
In our last post we looked at a fascinating collection of books written in the period of time just after the death of the apostles: The Apostolic Fathers. These books were not included in the canon for a variety of reasons, mostly because they were not apostolic in origin. They are still fascinating to consider: […]
