What Are We Exalting When We Exalt the Cross?
We lift it high so that we can see it, but we must resist the temptation to climb upon it and make it a throne.
Peter Preble
Faith • Grief • History • Hope
Peter Preble
Faith • Grief • History • Hope
Tag Ramblings
More Than Our Fear: A Reflection on 9/11
Twenty-five years after September 11th, our grief has become more complicated. Some carry the deeply personal grief of someone they loved and lost; others carry the collective grief of a world that changed before our eyes. And now a generation has come of age knowing September 11th only as history. As memory passes from one generation to another, perhaps the question is no longer simply whether we will remember, but what our remembering will make of us.
Artificial Intelligence Can Assist a Pastor. It Cannot Bear Pastoral Responsibility
Artificial intelligence can assist with research, biblical interpretation, writing, and even pastoral preparation. But the central ethical question is not simply whether pastors use AI. It is what we ask these tools to do, and whether we surrender responsibilities that belong to the relationship between pastor and people.
God Does Not Need Our Help Ending the World: Why JD Vance’s Comments About the End Times Should Trouble Christians
Christian hope trusts that the future belongs to God. It does not give politicians permission to hasten catastrophe, baptize political agendas as “God’s work,” or treat the end of the world as an acceptable outcome. The end of history belongs to God. Our calling is to love our neighbors while we are here.
The Chair Across the Table
A chair quietly keeps the history of everyone who has ever occupied it. Some remind us of those we miss. Others wait for someone we have not yet welcomed. Love has always known how to make room.
The Ghosts on My Dining Room Wall: Learning to Listen to the Puritans Again
The figures on my dining room wall and the pencil marks of an unknown reader reminded me that history is not silent. The past still speaks, if we are willing to listen.
Beyond Separation: Church, State, and the Christian Vocation
What if the debate over church and state is older—and richer—than our modern political arguments suggest? Before we settle into today's slogans, perhaps we should return to eighteenth-century New England, where faithful Christians wrestled with conscience, covenant, liberty, and the Gospel itself. The questions they asked may be exactly the questions we still need to ask today.
Bread, Wine, and the Streets: Why the Sacramental Life Must Shape Our Protest
But if our protest is not rooted deeply in prayer and grounded in the sacramental life of the Church, it risks becoming just another form of noise in an already angry and fractured world.
Held in the Fire, Kept in Grace
“Maybe the fire you’re walking through is not meant to destroy you, but to reveal how deeply grace can hold you.”
The ‘Third Testament’ and the Prophetic Witness of Bishop Flunder: God Is Still Speaking
To understand what Bishop Flunder was pointing toward, we must begin with a truth the Church has long professed, even if we have not always lived it fully: God is not finished speaking.