We’re a week away from the election and anxiety is running at an all-time high. And it’s become an addictive pastime to read every shred of news that promises to predict the future. One spiritual discipline that might help us to resist this exhausting reality is the beatitudes. Unlike a prayer that summons our present selves before the God of all grace, a beatitude invites us to imagine our truest selves under the light of God’s grace and, by the Spirit's power, to re-order our desires in order to live into our truest selves.

Here are questions that I've found useful to ask myself upon turning 50:

Would my wife say, behind closed doors, that I was loving her well?

Do my children feel well-loved in the deepest places of their hearts? Do they feel truly seen by me?
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wdavidotaylor.com/blog/on-turnin… Am I loving my parents and siblings and uncle-with-dementia and nieces & nephews well, as hard as it may, on certain days, to love one’s family members well, truly love them despite all of our irksome personality traits and mystifying habits?

The deepest, most final desire of embodied humans is to be loved *through* touch by our bodily resurrected Lord. And yet, as Paul Griffiths rightly points out, all too-many Christians feel deeply uncomfortable about this eventual possibility. But they shouldn't.

A thread. “Most contemporary Christians in Europe and North America...tend to deny that they want to touch Jesus or be touched by him. Isn’t it enough to look and see, they say? Isn’t that what Scripture commends to us—that we’ll see and know the LORD as we are known?"

Pastors have an un-enviable job these days. No matter what they say, no matter how carefully said, no matter what they do, however thoughtful or lovingly done, they will *always* have somebody get mad at them, think ill of them, or judge them hastily. They need our prayers. 1/ Our political atmosphere, like a psychotropic drug gone nightmarishly wrong, makes us mad in the head and wildly reactive. The media, on the left and on the right, winds us up and throws us into an emotional tailspin, even while it keeps us addicted to the "news" of the day. 2/

Recent history has exposed a defective doctrine of sanctification in our churches. Sanctification identifies the Spirit's work to mortify sin and to generate new life. Humility is its chief expression. In humility we keep asking ourselves: How have I failed to love my neighbor? How, O God, have I sinned against my neighbor? How might You enlarge my heart to feel my neighbors' joys and sorrows--with them, for them? Where am I blind to your ways? How am I deaf to your voice? In what ways is my heart hardened to the things that you care about?

Via @edstetzer: "most, not all, evangelicals shy away from overly ritualistic or liturgical worship, yet in so doing we turn our services into performances and our time of singing into the latest play list of what’s new." I've got only one point to make... christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2020… And it's not the same ol' same ol' harangues & requiems & critiques of typically non-denom evangelical worship. I've grown bored of those. Borrrrrrrring. I'm more interested in playing a hopeful, constructive, bridge-building, shrewd role in this work. Hence a book I wrote...

If you regularly read the psalms and it's not helping you to become more vulnerable--vulnerable with God, vulnerable with others, vulnerable with yourself and with a watching world--then you might need to adopt a new habit of reading the psalms. Or you might just need to start. Becoming truly vulnerable is a terrifying thing, of course. Few of us choose it naturally. We resist it by nature & by dint of the damage that we have suffered from others who have taken advantage of our vulnerability--judging us unfairly, rejecting us, ridiculing us, hurting us.

The liturgy is not simply a place where we declare our theology, as if what we needed was a public setting where we could remind ourselves of things that we could just as easily do elsewhere. The liturgy rather is a dynamic setting where we *do* theology. In the liturgy, we learn how to become by the Spirit’s help our “already-not yet” true selves, dramatically anticipating today our destiny at the end of the age. Said otherwise, in the liturgy, we don't merely sing *about* the truth; we sing ourselves *into* the truth.

A student raised his hand in class @regentcollege and asked J.I. Packer if he could explain the meaning of the phrase "the quick and the dead," which appears in the Nicene Creed. Without missing a beat he answered:

"They say that in New York if you're not quick you're dead." Packer was profligate in his use of aphorisms and always found ways to make theology come alive for his students. He once explained Christ's mediatory role by way of this just-shy-of-impious analogy:

"Jesus Christ is the Atlanta Airport...through which everything has to go."

I've noticed an alarming uptick in pugilistic language from my conservative Christian friends. It's as if the "attack dog" mentality of particular political leaders has somehow normalized this mode of engagement. "We're not going to take it lying down any more" is the now motto. All of this is both disheartening and disturbing to see. The Bible is invariably marshaled in defense of this approach to one's neighbors who are now perceived as enemies. And a certain notion of "muscular Christianity" is invoked to underwrite a no holds barred rhetoric.

I've heard this point from my pastor friends, that fewer people are tuning in to Sunday morning worship services, but it's helpful also to see this @BarnaGroup research underscore the point. While this trend is super discouraging, there's hope too. THREAD. barna.com/research/new-s… Despite the very best efforts of church leaders to provide excellent online worship, small group experiences on Zoom, virtual VBS for kids, book clubs on Facebook, Instagram Live prayer times, etc., their people are still wandering away and struggling with digital fatigue.

When less is more and boundaries are everything: “An unquestioned assumption in our culture holds that the more hours spent on work...the better we’ll perform and the more successful and happier we’ll be. What if none of that’s true?” nytimes.com/2020/06/23/mag… “Everything our culture produces feels at once never-ending and meaningless — or perhaps meaningless because it’s never-ending. Movies explode into cinematic universes; series are designed to be binge-watched; every video, song or podcast tips over and auto-plays another...”

This is your friendly quarterly reminder that real men cry. The idea that "boys don't cry" is irrational, physically noxious, emotionally botched, biblically heretical, theologically evil. Jesus wept. Luke says we're blessed when we weep. Paul tells us to weep w/ those who weep. We live in a broken world for God's sake. Divorce fractures a family. Prolonged loneliness leads to a crippling depression. Chronic pain, domestic abuse, quiet despair, unexpected deaths, violence, loss of meaningful work, repeated failure mark our lives. It's all grievous.

No book review is worth taking seriously if it fails to be both charitable & critical. @debrakrienstra does both in a review of my bk. "For pastors & teachers wanting to invite people more deeply into the psalms, Open & Unafraid is an ideal recommendation."blog.reformedjournal.com/2020/06/27/fai… She's right about this part at the end of each chapter: "Let the reader beware, though: the questions & exercises are not easy little Twinkies. They are robust, more like the Bible study equivalent of Pilates. You would have to choose from among them rather than trying them all."

While I don't talk about monumental art in my @eerdmansbooks book, "Glimpses of the New Creation," I do talk about the unique power that permanent & occasional art possess in our spaces of corporate worship: what we see Sunday after Sunday versus what we see only momentarily. 1/ The power of permanent works of art is a durative, *definitive* one. Such works of art can outlast the first generation of a church and often define a church’s singular identity in the world. The stained glass windows that belong to Duke Chapel illustrate this point.

One of the reasons why the monastic tradition has held so firmly to a disciplined reading of the psalms is not just because we acquire a true knowledge and love of God, but also and perhaps more importantly because we acquire God-attuned instincts born out of a habit of prayer. Left to our own devices, we will as likely pray to a god made in our own image, driven by our own idiosyncratic desires, warped by our sin-intoxicated passions—a rational god, a pacifying god, an activist god, an abstract god, a wonder-working god, a cruel god, a "nice" god.

What exactly does justice look like in the psalms? It positively maintains the rights of the weak. It rejects the use of bullying words. It doesn't take advantage of the vulnerable. It doesn't love violence. Those who love justice actively reject all systems that oppress people. Where there is enemy talk in the psalms, there is also justice talk. Where there is injustice talk, there is also a plea for a Just Judge to make things right or, as philosophers might put it, to give people what they are due.

Do you feel like your prayers stumble along? That you find yourself saying the same thing over & over? That they fall on deaf ears? That they don't make a difference in the world? Then you're not alone. Join @Sandramccracken & me tonight for a chat and song on psalms & prayer! Most simply, prayer is about talking to God & listening to God. In practice, prayer is anything but simple. Pentecostals pray in tongues. Benedictine monks pray in Latin. Little children ramble to God, while adults struggle to talk to God or talk to God in habituated ways.

To put my remark in context, my point here is a pastoral one, not a normative one. I wish to encourage artists who made their best work "late" in life or who have yet to make their "best" work, their advancing years notwithstanding. In God's economy there's plenty of time yet.

https://twitter.com/wdavidotaylor/status/1261480781140107264

Conversely, plenty of authors published young & we're really glad that they did. Mary Shelley published "Frankenstein" at 21, while Hellen Keller wrote her autobiography at 22. My friend Lauren Winner wrote her first book at 25. Bonhoeffer wrote "The Cost of Discipleship" at 31.

My neighbor has everything to do with me, Karl Barth argues, because Jesus, as the one who exists for and with my neighbor, frees me to receive my neighbor gladly. In Christ I am freed *from* the idolatry of my self and *for* the love of my neighbor in vulnerability & gratitude. Our national debate over social distancing practices involves a contest of ideas: in simplistic terms, a peculiarly American idea of "freedom" vs. a peculiarly American idea of "sociality." This contest manifests itself in shaming tactics, browbeating and passive-aggressiveness.

Everybody has a story: "Born Richard Wayne Penniman on December 5th, 1932, in Macon, Georgia, he was one of 12 children and grew up around uncles who were preachers. I was born in the slums. My daddy sold whiskey, bootleg whiskey'." rollingstone.com/music/music-ne… "By 1956, he was washing dishes at the Greyhound bus station in Macon (a job he had first taken a few years earlier after his father was murdered and Little Richard had to support his family). By then, only one track he’d cut...hinted at the musical tornado to come."