Saint Julian Press: Theology & Spirituality

The Language of Angels

Saint Julian Press — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 21:28:43 GMT

When theologians—or people formed in the grammar of faith, like James Talarico—speak of God beyond our categories, even as “nonbinary,” they are reaching toward what the Scriptures have never ceased to say: that God is not contained, but eternal and everlasting, beyond all limitation.

Chiesa di San Francesco ~ Pienza, Italy

The language and images we use for God were never meant to define, but to invite.

In a moment of sharp reaction and quick judgment, it may be worth listening more carefully—to Scripture, to tradition, and to the deeper currents of faith that speak in poetry, presence, and love—again and again, through Scripture and sacrament.

Entering the Language of Angels

When we imagine and encounter God directly through Scripture and sacrament, we are not entering a system of definitions.

We are entering a living language.

A language shaped by breath and fire, by memory and longing, by the slow unveiling of presence. A language not meant to contain God, but to draw us nearer.

The Language We Were Given

From the beginning, the Scriptures speak this way:

“Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…”
— Book of Genesis 1:26

Not a formula, but a mystery.
Not an explanation, but a declaration of dignity:

that something of the divine life is reflected in us,
and that we are made for a relationship with God.

And then, before there is speech, there is movement:

“The Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters.”
— Book of Genesis 1:2

Breath. Wind. Ruach.
Feminine in its grammar.
Generative in its motion.

Life begins not with certainty, but with presence.

And Wisdom—always there, always calling:

“Wisdom cries aloud in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice…
at the city gates she speaks.”
— Book of Proverbs 1:20–21

Not hidden.
Not silent.
But present—calling into the life of the world.

“Does not Wisdom call…?”
— Book of Proverbs 8:1
“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work…
when he established the heavens, I was there.”
— Book of Proverbs 8:22–27

She stands at the threshold of creation,
not separate from God,
but expressive of God’s ordering, inviting presence.

And in the end, she does not argue—she invites:

“Wisdom has built her house…
she has prepared her table…
‘Come, eat of my bread…’”
— Book of Proverbs 9:1–5

A table set.
A life offered.
An invitation to dwell within what God has made.

The Deeper Memory

Long before these words were written in Greek, Israel had already learned another language.

The language of lovingkindness—ḥesed (חֶסֶד), a Hebrew word often translated as “steadfast love,” “loyal love,” or “loving-kindness.”

Not sentiment.
Not abstraction.

But a love that keeps its promises.
A love that returns.
A love that binds itself to another and refuses to let go.

This is how God was known:

“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” — Book of Psalms 103:8
“Your lovingkindness is better than life.” — Book of Psalms 63:3

What Is Being Attempted

And then, in time, Jesus speaks—not to replace this language, but to gather it:

“Our Father…” — Gospel of Matthew 6:9

Not to define God as male,
but to open the door to intimacy—
to trust, to belonging, to nearness.

And even here, the language widens:

“God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” — Gospel of John 4:24

No longer confined to mountain or temple.
No longer held in place.

God is encountered—
in breath, in truth, in presence.

And then the words that press us further still:

“God is love.” — First Epistle of John 4:8
“God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”
— First Epistle of John 4:16

Not a concept.
Not a definition.

But a life.

A life into which we are drawn,
and by which we are measured.

So when a phrase emerges in our time—
spoken perhaps too quickly,
heard perhaps too narrowly—

we might pause.

Because the language of faith has never been singular.

It has always been a chorus.
A harmony, not a contradiction.

And when James Talarico speaks of God beyond our categories,
he is reaching toward something the Scriptures themselves have never ceased to say:

that God is not contained.

Not by place.
Not by image.
Not by the boundaries of our own making.

This is not a rejection of Scripture.
It is, in fact, deeply biblical—rooted in one of the oldest understandings carried through both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament:

that every name for God is true,
and none is sufficient.

In the Hebrew tradition, God is spoken of through many names—some held as sacred beyond utterance, others carried in prayer and story—each one true, each one revealing, and none sufficient to contain the fullness of the One who is named.

The Weight of Words

The Christian Church has received its language:

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

And rightly so.

But these are not walls.

They are windows.

And through them, the light still moves—
in Wisdom’s voice,
in Spirit’s breath,
in lovingkindness that does not fail.

Presence

And at the table—
in the breaking of bread—
Christians do not define.

They receive.

Christ is present.

Truly.
Mysteriously.
Assuredly.

And in that Real Presence, something within us loosens.

The need to contain.
The need to resolve.

And what remains is this:

Relationship. Gift. Love.

Chiesa di San Francesco ~ Pienza, Italy

A More Careful Hearing

So perhaps the question is not whether our language is perfect.

It has never been.

The question is whether it remains alive—
whether it still forms us.

Because in the end, the Scriptures were never given to define God.

They were given to shape a people.

“Let us make humankind in our image…” — Book of Genesis

To teach us how to see.
How to listen.
How to love.

The Invitation Before Us

The tradition has always held this tension:

God is known.
And God is beyond knowing.

We are given words.
And those words are never enough.

So we speak them anyway—

carefully, reverently, sometimes imperfectly—

trusting that they will lead us not into certainty,
but into relationship.

And perhaps that is what is being sought here.

Not a new God.
Not a diminished faith.

But a reminder—

quiet, insistent—

that the One we encounter in Scripture and sacrament
has always been greater
than the language we use to name God—

Him, or Her, or the great I AM.

Or, more truly still—

the One who is met in love,
and known most clearly
when that love is lived.

The language of angels was never meant to contain God—it was given so that, in love, we might be drawn into the life of the One who is Spirit, who is love, and who is known wherever that love is lived.

Learning To See One Another Again

Saint Julian Press — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 10:20:41 GMT

Jerusalem ~ 1900

Jerusalem 1900: At the turn of the twentieth century, Jerusalem and its surroundings were part of the Ottoman Empire. Jerusalem was a small, deeply religious city, its life shaped by prayer and the quiet rhythms of daily existence. Muslim and Christian Arabs lived alongside long-established Jewish communities, with new arrivals beginning to come. People were bound more by faith and place than by national identity.

The divisions we now see had not yet hardened. There were tensions, but not yet the fixed lines of modern conflict—only a shared and complex human presence, still unfolding.

This essay is paired with another, a poetic reflection that is a lament for two people traumatized by conflict and war. Both are intended as a bridge to something more thoughtful.

Even Now / We Who Remain

An Introduction

There are moments when the language we have inherited no longer feels sufficient for the reality before us. There is also growing recognition in public conversation that the frameworks we have long relied on no longer fully describe what is unfolding.

We reach for words like security and justice, survival and peace, and yet we sense that something essential remains just beyond them—something human, something difficult to hold without losing our footing.

This reflection comes from living within that tension.

I write with a conviction I do not question: that Israel has the right to exist and the obligation to defend its people in the face of real and enduring threats. And I write with another conviction that has grown alongside it: that the exercise of power, especially sustained power, carries moral weight that cannot be set aside.

I have also come to hold, with equal seriousness, the lives of the Palestinian people—families living alongside, bearing their own history, their own longing for dignity, for security, for the possibility of a future shaped by something other than fear, including the hope of self-determination, and of a future not governed by fear alone.

These are not opposing claims. They are realities that must be held together, however difficult that may be.

What follows is not an argument, but an attempt to see more clearly—to listen for voices that are often unheard, and to recover a language of covenant, justice, and mercy that may help us remain human in a moment that resists it.

I. What I Have Carried

I have come to see how much of what I have understood has been shaped at a distance.

I have spoken in the language available to me—security, alliance, threat, survival. These are not untrue. But they are not the whole.

For some time now, I have been aware of another reality, less easily named, that does not travel well across oceans. It is not found in statements or positions, but in the texture of daily life—where people wake, work, pray, and raise children within conditions they did not create but must inhabit.

This awareness has not come all at once. It has been forming quietly—shaping how I think about conflict, about violence, and about what it means to respond faithfully in a world where suffering is not evenly distributed.

I have seen how difficult it is to hold this reality without retreating into simpler language. And yet, I find I can no longer speak as though what lies beneath can remain unexamined.

There is another reality, less easily named, that does not travel well across oceans.

II. What I Know to Be True

There are things I know I must say plainly.

Israel has the right to exist. It has the obligation to defend the lives of its people. This is not theoretical. It arises from a history that is not distant, and from threats that are not imagined. The presence of violence—whether from Hamas, Hezbollah, or the regional ambitions of Iran—is real. It shapes decisions. It narrows options. It presses upon the conscience of a nation.

I have held this conviction for a long time. Security is not an abstraction. It is the condition under which life becomes possible.

And yet, I have also come to understand that it is not the only condition.

Security is not the whole of the moral life. It is the condition under which life becomes possible.

III. The Question That Persists

Another question has remained with me.

What is required of a people when they hold power—especially sustained power—over the lives of others?

This does not, to me, feel like a question imposed from outside. It rises from within the tradition itself—from the deeper current of what covenant has always meant.

The prophets did not speak of land without also speaking of justice. They did not speak of promise without also speaking of mercy. Isaiah, Amos, Micah—their voices converge on a single insistence: that the measure of a people is not only what has been given to them, but how they live with what has been given.

This question has not left me.

I have also come to see how easily faith itself can be bent—used to avoid responsibility, used to justify power, or softened into something that comforts without asking anything of us. And I find that I can no longer accept any of these. If covenant is to mean anything, it must be able to bear the weight of truth, even when that truth is difficult to name.

IV. What I Have Come to Understand About Violence

Over time, I have had to reckon with something I once held too simply.

Peace does not emerge where violence is allowed to endure unchecked.

There are forces—armed movements, militias, and hardened ideologies—that do not seek coexistence, but control. Their power is sustained through fear, and their presence narrows what is possible until even the imagination of peace begins to fade.

I have come to see that these forces do not belong to one people alone. They arise wherever fear hardens into certainty, and where violence is accepted as a means of securing the future—threatening not one people, but all who must live within its reach.

To speak honestly of peace requires acknowledging the difficult and necessary work of confronting such forces—of limiting their reach, of disarming what can be disarmed, and of refusing to grant them the final word over the lives they shape. This is not a judgment upon the ordinary structures of life—upon the institutions of state, the realities of self-defense, the responsibilities of governance, or the quiet, necessary work of care and commerce—but rather a recognition that, at the fringes, where these structures weaken, radicalization can take hold and begin to define the horizon for everyone else.

This, too, is part of justice.

And yet, I cannot hold this without also acknowledging the cost.

Even necessary action carries consequence. Lives are not abstract, and the effects of force do not fall evenly. Civilians—families, children, the ordinary fabric of human life—are drawn into what they did not choose, and what they cannot easily escape.

It is all part of the same reality—one that resists simplification and refuses easy resolution. It asks that we hold together two truths that do not easily rest beside one another: that violence must be restrained, and that its restraint, when it comes through force, leaves its own imprint upon the lives it touches.

Where communities remain in the shadow of violence, healing is difficult, and reconciliation struggles to take root where fear continues to govern. Security, rightly held, is not opposed to mercy. It is what allows mercy to take hold—not as sentiment, but as something lived.

And yet, even this does not complete the task. It only makes room for what must follow.

V. The Voices I Have Learned to Hear

It has become clear to me that there are voices within Israel itself that have been asking these questions all along.

Some speak in the language of law and democracy. Others in the language of faith. Still others in quiet acts of encounter across lines that have grown hard.

Martin Buber spoke of meeting the other not as object, but as presence. Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned of the dangers of sanctifying power.

As I have listened more closely, I have come to understand that Buber’s concern was not simply political, but deeply theological.

He did not deny the Jewish connection to the land. He did not dismiss its history or its longing. But he resisted any understanding of the land as an absolute possession—something held without remainder, or claimed without responsibility.

For Buber, covenant was never fulfilled by possession alone. It was fulfilled in relationship—relationship to God, and therefore to those who also lived upon the land.

The land, in this sense, was not an entitlement secured once and for all. It was something entrusted. A place not only of belonging, but of testing—where the life of a people would be measured by how they lived with those who were not themselves. A setting in which a people was called to live in such a way that justice and responsibility would become visible—not only within their own community, but in their relation to others.

And where that relation was broken—where the other was no longer encountered as a Thou, but reduced to an It—something essential to the covenant itself was diminished.

I have come to see that this is the deeper tension he was naming: that the promise of the land could not be separated from the obligation it carried. That to hold the land without regard for the lives bound up within it was to misunderstand what had been given.

This does not resolve the political questions. It does not remove the reality of threat, or the necessity of security. But it does place a different kind of weight upon them.

It asks not only what is ours to hold,
but how we are called to live with what has been entrusted to us.

In Buber’s understanding, the covenant was never meant to secure a people against the presence of others, but to shape how that presence is encountered.

The land, in this sense, cannot be held as an exclusive claim without diminishing the very relationship it is meant to sustain. It is not given as a possession to be defended at all costs, but as a place in which a people learns—again and again—what it means to live before God in the presence of another.

To live covenantally in the land, then, is not simply to remain upon it, but to recognize that it is already shared—whether acknowledged or not. Not as concession, but as condition.

And in that condition, the question of covenant becomes more demanding, not less. It asks whether a people can remain faithful not only in their attachment to the land, but in their responsibility to those who dwell within it alongside them.

For Buber, this was not a political formula. It was a spiritual test: whether the land becomes a place of encounter—or a place where encounter is refused.

And in that refusal, something essential to the covenant itself is placed at risk.

These are not voices from outside. They arise from within the life of the people themselves. They do not always agree. But I hear in them a shared conviction that covenant is not fulfilled by possession alone, but by the manner in which one lives in relation to others.

Listening to them has changed how I understand what is unfolding.

I have also come to recognize that this question is not asked from one side alone.

There are voices among the Palestinian people—Christian and Muslim alike—who speak from within their own experience of the land, carrying a similar insistence on dignity, memory, and the possibility of shared life. Figures such as Elias Chacour and Sari Nusseibeh remind me that the question of how we live together is not theoretical, but lived—borne in the weight of daily life, and in the fragile hope that coexistence remains possible, and in the quiet persistence of memory that refuses to disappear.

VI. What This Has Taught Me to See

An older language has taken on new weight for me.

That each person bears the image of God.

I have come to see that dignity is not something conferred by status, nor withdrawn by circumstance. It is something to be recognized.

And I have seen how often it is not.

I have seen how easily a life becomes a category,
how quickly a person is absorbed into a cause,
how readily we speak without truly seeing.

And I know now that when this happens, something essential is diminished—not only in the one who is unseen, but in me.

When we fail to see one another rightly, something essential is diminished—not only in them, but in us.

VII. Where This Leaves Me

I do not feel that I have resolved these questions.

What I can say is that they have shaped me.

They have changed how I listen,
how I speak,
how I try to see.

We are not at the point of resolution. It would be untrue to say otherwise.

But I believe we may be at the point of attention.

To see more clearly.
To listen more carefully.
To allow the lives of others to appear not as
extensions of a position, but as lives in their own right.

I hold this now with greater conviction:

That each life—Israeli and Palestinian—must be freed not only from injustice, but from the fear that makes justice impossible. And that to move toward such freedom will require something deeper than agreement—a form of reconciliation that is, in its demands, nothing less than radical.

And that this freedom, fragile and unfinished,
is where the hard, open work of healing may begin again.

—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc. © 2026
Houston, Texas

Other Voices

These are not voices of extremity, but of reflection—rooted in lived experience, and in a continued search for dignity within a shared and contested land.

Elias Chacour, Blood Brothers. A Palestinian Christian perspective shaped by displacement and reconciliation, emphasizing the possibility of shared life grounded in dignity and forgiveness.

Sari Nusseibeh, Once Upon a Country. A reflective account of Palestinian identity, exploring coexistence, compromise, and the human limits of political solutions.

Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Poetry that gives voice to memory, longing, and belonging, offering a deeply human portrayal of life shaped by land and loss.

Munther Isaac, various writings and sermons. A contemporary pastoral voice engaging questions of faith, justice, and dignity within the realities of daily life in the region.

This reflection emerges, in part, from recent conversations about what some have described as a “one-state reality” in Israel and the Palestinian territories, including discussions featured in The Ezra Klein Show with Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami (New York Times, April 14, 2026).

A Note on Public Theology

Written in quiet conversation with the work of C. Andrew Doyle on public theology and the responsibilities of faith in public life. His writing reflects a concern that faith, when pressed into the service of public life, can lose its center—becoming a tool of certainty, a justification for power, or a refuge from difficult truths. What remains, in his vision, is a quieter but more demanding calling: to hold faith in a way that keeps us human, attentive, and accountable to the dignity of others.

On Being Human

Saint Julian Press — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 10:58:14 GMT

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.”
— Book of Isaiah 43:1

Palm Sunday & A Journey Toward Easter

It begins with a road.

Branches laid down. Voices lifted.
Hope rising in the air like something almost within reach.

On Palm Sunday, we remember a procession—joyful, expectant, certain that what is coming will look like victory. A people longing for order, for restoration, for a world set right.

And yet, even as the crowd gathers, another story is already unfolding.

For the One who enters does not come to secure power,
but to reveal it.

Not to meet expectations,
but to transform them.

Not to narrow the world,
but to open it.

This is the beginning of a journey—one that will move through betrayal and silence, through suffering and surrender, toward a life not yet fully understood.

A journey toward Easter.

We enter this week with our own expectations, our own fears, our own definitions of what faith must protect and preserve.

But Holy Week does not begin with certainty.

It begins with a question:

What kind of life are we welcoming?

And what kind of life are we willing to follow—
when it refuses to be contained by fear,
by power,
or by the limits we have drawn around what it means to be human?

I. The Quiet Question

There are questions that arrive loudly—announced in headlines, argued in public, decided in courts.

And there are questions that arrive quietly, almost beneath notice, yet shape everything that follows.

This is one of them:

What does it mean to be human?

Not in theory, but in practice.
Not in abstraction, but in the presence of one another.

What does it mean to live as people of faith—many faiths—in a world that is at once more connected and more divided than we have ever known?

And perhaps more urgently:

Can we live without fear?

II. The World We Are Learning to See

We are not who we once thought we were.

Not because something has gone wrong,
but because something has been revealed.

We understand more now about the human person—about development, identity, relationship, the long interior work of becoming. We see more clearly that human lives do not unfold along a single line.

They branch.
They bend.
They carry complexity within them.

What once appeared simple now appears layered.
What once seemed fixed now reveals depth.

This is not a failure of creation.

It is part of its unfolding.

III. Two Ways of Meeting the Same Moment

Some experience this as disorientation.

The ground feels less certain.
The categories less stable.
The boundaries less clear.

At places like Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Liberty University, this moment is often met with vigilance—a desire to preserve what has been received, to guard what has been named as true.

Doctrine must be held.
Order must be maintained.
The inheritance must not be surrendered.

This response arises, in part, from care.
From a longing to remain faithful.

But it is not the only way this moment is being understood.

Elsewhere—in traditions shaped by communities such as Virginia Theological Seminary, Seminary of the Southwest, Candler School of Theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, and Union Theological Seminary—the same changes are received differently.

Not as loss.
But as recognition.

A widening awareness of lives long present.
A deeper attentiveness to dignity that was always there, even when it was unseen.

IV. The Shape of Fear—and the Shape of Trust

Fear narrows.

It draws lines.
It tightens definitions.
It teaches us to guard what we love by limiting what we allow.

And when fear enters faith, something subtle shifts.

Love remains—but it becomes conditional.
Welcome remains—but it becomes qualified.
The stranger—once central—becomes uncertain.

Trust, by contrast, opens.

Not without discernment.
Not without thought.

But with the quiet conviction that truth does not require protection by force.

That what is real can endure encounter.
That what is of God will not be undone by being seen more fully.

V. Memory and the Work of Honesty

There is, for many, a memory of a more ordered world.

A time when roles were clearer, expectations more widely shared, life more legible.

But memory is selective.

The coherence of that earlier world often depended on what was not yet acknowledged—on inequalities that were present but unspoken, on lives that were real but not fully recognized.

To remember honestly is not to reject the past.
It is to see it whole.

And to understand that what we are living through now is not simply change,
but the ongoing work of recognition.

VI. The Divine Beyond Our Boundaries

Faith, at its deepest, does not belong to any single moment.

It is not confined to a decade, a culture, a set of assumptions.

For those formed in the Christian story, the claim is even more radical:

That Christ is not bound by time.
That redemption is not limited to what has already been understood.
That the divine life is not exhausted by our current categories.

“Fear not,” the Scripture says.

Not because everything is clear,
but because God is present—even in what is not yet fully known.

VII. The Risk of Becoming Rigid

There is a temptation in every age to secure faith by fixing it.

To codify what has been received.
To draw boundaries that do not move.
To protect truth by making it immovable.

But when faith becomes inflexible, it begins to lose something essential.

Its capacity to listen.
Its openness to mercy.
Its ability to recognize life where it did not expect to find it.

The form remains.
But the spirit tightens.

Jesus meets this tension directly—not by rejecting tradition, but by restoring its center.

“The sabbath was made for humankind,” he says, returning law to life.
“You have neglected the weightier matters—justice and mercy,” he warns, when form overtakes purpose.
“I desire mercy, not sacrifice,” he repeats, calling attention back to what cannot be codified.

Again and again, he places a person in front of the rule—
the hungry, the suffering, the outcast—
and asks, in effect:

What does love require here?

Not in abstraction.
Not in theory.
But in the living presence before us.

For Jesus, truth is not weakened by mercy.
It is revealed through it.

And when faith can no longer respond to the human being in front of it—
when it cannot recognize dignity, complexity, or need—
it is not that truth has been lost.

It is that it has been held too tightly to breathe.

VIII. The Prophetic Boundary

There is a line the Church must not cross.

When faith becomes aligned with power in such a way that it begins to define belonging for others—when it moves from witness to enforcement—it ceases to be free.

This is not a new insight.

It was spoken with clarity in the Barmen Declaration, when the Church declared that its allegiance belongs to Christ alone.

It was lived, at great cost, by the Confessing Church, who refused to allow faith to be absorbed into the ambitions of the state.

Their witness remains.

Not as history alone,
but as a reminder:

The Church is most faithful when it is most free.

IX. On Being Unafraid

To live without fear is not to abandon conviction.

It is to hold conviction without closing the heart.

It is to trust that truth is not so fragile that it must be shielded from complexity.

It is to believe that human dignity—wherever it is found—is not a threat to faith,
but a sign of the divine image at work.

To be unafraid is to remain open enough to see,
steady enough to discern,
and faithful enough to love.

X. A Closing Invitation

We are still learning what it means to be human.

Still learning how to live together.
Still learning how to recognize one another—not as categories, but as persons.

The question before us is not whether change will come.

It is whether we will meet it with fear,
or with the quiet courage of faith.

Whether we will narrow what it means to belong,
or allow it to expand toward the fullness that has always been there.

And whether, in the end, we will live as people who believe—

truly believe—

that the divine is not diminished by our openness to one another,
but revealed within it.

—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc. © 2026
Houston, Texas

The Anglican & Episcopal Witness

Within the life of the Anglican Communion, and the Episcopal Church as part of that communion, there has long been a quiet but persistent instinct:

To hold faith without hardening it.
To preserve tradition without closing the door to insight.
To seek truth not only in doctrine, but in prayer, relationship, and lived experience.

This is not accidental.

It grows out of a way of being Christian that resists extremes—
not out of indecision,
but out of a conviction that truth is often best held in tension
rather than forced into certainty.

Scripture, Tradition, Reason—And
Something More

Anglicanism is often described through the balance of:

Scripture
Tradition
Reason

But lived out, it becomes something more human:

Scripture, read in community
Tradition, received but not frozen
Reason, open to new knowledge and experience

This creates space for:

An attentiveness to human complexity
A willingness to see dignity where it was once overlooked
A capacity to grow without abandoning faith

Mercy at the Center

At its best, Anglican spirituality is not driven by fear.

It is shaped by:

Liturgy that returns, week after week, to confession and absolution
Eucharist that centers grace, not worthiness
Prayer that forms humility rather than certainty

The result is a faith that tends to ask:

Where is mercy needed here?
Where is God already at work?
How do we respond without closing the door?

This is not a faith that abandons truth—
but one that trusts truth is revealed most clearly through love rightly ordered.

A Tradition Resistant to Fusion with Power

Historically, Anglicanism has also learned—sometimes painfully—the danger of fusing Church and state.

That history has left a mark:

A caution.
A restraint.
A recognition that when faith becomes an instrument of power,
something essential is lost.

This is why, within Anglican thought, the warnings echoed in the
The Barmen Declaration resonates so deeply.

Not because they are Anglican in origin,
but because they articulate something Anglicanism has long intuited:

The Church must remain free in order to remain faithful.

Time & Chances

Saint Julian Press — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 22:21:20 GMT

I’d like to share this music video from a new friend. It is very well done.

“Time & Chances” Official Music Video | Joey McGee at Blue Rock Studio Featuring Ellen Melissa Story

Where the Meeting Holds

Saint Julian Press — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 10:20:54 GMT

It is possible, now, to feel connected
without ever having been met.

I. The Nearness That Comes Too Easily

There is a nearness that comes to us now with almost no effort.

It arrives already formed—before we have asked anything of it, before we have tested its weight. It gathers us in the soft glow of recognition, in the quiet relief of hearing our own thoughts returned to us in another voice. It feels, at first, like belonging.

We should not dismiss that feeling too quickly. The desire to belong is not a weakness. It is among the oldest movements of the human spirit. It draws us toward one another, toward community, toward the fragile hope that we might be known and not turned away.

And yet, something in this nearness is thinner than it appears.

It does not ask us to linger. It does not ask us to change. It does not place us under the quiet discipline of another’s presence. It moves quickly, and because it moves quickly, it carries little weight.

It is now possible to feel connected without ever having been met.

Across our public life, this form of nearness has taken on an almost invisible authority. In politics, alignment begins to stand in for understanding. In the media, repetition takes on the form of truth. In the fragile architecture of global relationships, trust—once strained—no longer yields to reassurance so easily.

Something essential is being asked of us, though we may not yet have named it.

What does it mean, now, to meet?

II. The Space That Cannot Be Scaled

Martin Buber gave us a language for something most of us have known, if only in passing.

He called it the between.

Not the self alone, and not the other alone, but the living space that arises when one life stands before another without reduction. Not as role, not as category, not as an extension of expectation—but as presence.

He called this I–Thou.

It is a fragile thing. It cannot be hurried, and it does not submit to abstraction. It resists the logic of scale. It asks for attention, and in asking, it exposes us to something we cannot control.

For this reason, it is often set aside.

Not violently, not with intention. More often, it is simply replaced—quietly, almost imperceptibly—by something that resembles encounter but does not require it.

We do not notice the moment it happens. We only begin, gradually, to feel the absence.

The space of encounter is rarely destroyed.
It is replaced.

III. The Substitution We Have Accepted

We have grown accustomed to a certain kind of substitution.

A shared reaction begins to feel like a shared life. A common language—repeated often enough—begins to feel like truth. A collective emotion gathers us into something that resembles community, even as it asks very little of us in return.

We feel close.

But what we are often close to is not one another, but a shared reflection of one another—an agreement sustained by recognition rather than encounter.

Martin Buber understood that this, too, has a kind of power. He warned of what can happen when presence is replaced by projection, when a relationship is simulated rather than lived. What he described, in part, as a distortion of charisma is not simply about leaders, though it often appears there. It is about the subtle transformation of the space between people into something that gathers without ever truly meeting.

It feels like connection.

It does not require mutuality.

It invites us to belong.

It does not ask us to see.

IV. The Quiet Disappearance of the Other

Dietrich Bonhoeffer recognized this pattern not as a philosophical possibility, but as a lived danger.

Writing within the tightening horizon of the Nazi regime, he saw how quickly a people could come to prefer the idea of one another to the reality of one another. It did not begin in violence. It began with simplification.

The other became easier to name than to know.

And once that movement takes hold, something begins to harden. The openness required for encounter gives way to the certainty required for cohesion. Community remains—but it is no longer porous. It no longer allows for interruption. It becomes, in its own way, closed.

Bonhoeffer understood that this form of community is not sustained by truth, but by agreement. It depends on a shared image that must be protected, even at the cost of the persons who no longer fit within it.

The loss is not always visible at first.

But it is real.

The other is no longer encountered.
The other is managed.

We begin to prefer the idea of one another
to the reality of one another.

V. The World as It Now Feels

This is not confined to any single place. It is not owned by any one political vision. It has become, rather, a condition of the age.

It appears wherever identity begins to outweigh encounter, wherever certainty becomes more compelling than understanding, wherever belonging is secured not by depth, but by boundary.

We see it in the fracture of civic life, where disagreement is no longer held but resolved through distance. We see it in the language of nations, where long-standing relationships carry within them a new uncertainty—not only about shared interests, but about endurance itself.

Will you remain?
Will you hold?
Will the relationship survive the strain placed upon it?

These are not strategic questions alone.

They are questions of trust.

And trust does not yield to argument. It yields, if at all, to something slower, more costly, and less visible.

The restoration of the between cannot be declared.

It must be lived.

VI. The Discipline That Remains

Both Martin Buber and Dietrich Bonhoeffer point us toward a form of strength that does not announce itself.

It is not the strength of dominance, or clarity, or even persuasion.

It is the strength of remaining.

To remain in the presence of another without reducing them. To resist the quiet drift toward simplification. To allow the other to remain irreducible, even when that irreducibility unsettles us.

This is not passive.

It asks more of us than reaction ever will.

It asks for attention in a world designed to fragment it.
It asks for patience in a world that rewards speed.
It asks for a moral imagination capable of holding
complexity without collapsing into it.

It asks us, simply and profoundly, to stay.

VII. Where the Meeting Holds

There is a nearness that is given, not constructed.

It does not arrive quickly. It does not reassure us immediately. It does not gather us into easy coherence.

But it holds.

It holds in the conversation that does not resolve itself into agreement. It holds in the relationship that endures without dissolving differences. It holds in the recognition that another life stands before us, not as an extension of our own, but as something fully, quietly real.

We do not master this space.

We enter it, if we can.
We remain within it if we are willing.

And in that remaining, something becomes possible again—not certainty, not control, but encounter.

A form of truth that does not arrive all at once, but emerges slowly, in the space between lives that have not turned away.

Notes Toward the Meeting

There are readers who will want to follow these threads more directly, and others who will not. That is as it should be.

The ideas carried here do not belong only to books. They have always lived most fully in conversation, in presence, in the slow work of attention between lives. What is written can only gesture toward that meeting. It cannot replace it.

Still, there are voices that help us approach these questions without reducing them—voices that do not resolve the tension too quickly, but remain within it.

In David Brooks's essays, one begins to see how a life organized around achievement can give way, slowly and often reluctantly, to one shaped by relationship. His writing returns, again and again, to what cannot be measured—only lived—and in doing so, it opens a way into the world that Martin Buber described, even when it does not name it directly.

A different kind of clarity emerges in Krista Tippett's work. In her conversations, something increasingly rare is allowed to unfold: attention sustained long enough for another voice to become real. One hears no explanation, but encounters. The space between lives is not described so much as it is made audible.

For those who come to Dietrich Bonhoeffer through story rather than abstraction, Charles Marsh offers a life rendered with patience and depth. Bonhoeffer appears not as a fixed figure of certainty, but as a person shaped by relationships, by history, and by the cost of remaining faithful when clarity gives way to responsibility.

There are also those who have carried Bonhoeffer’s work with particular care, resisting the temptation to make him too easily available to the present. Victoria Barnett is among them, preserving the complexity of his thought and the specificity of his context, allowing him to remain, in an important sense, other.

Closer, perhaps, to the cadence of this essay is Rowan Williams, who writes as one who has chosen not to resolve what must instead be held. In his work, theology becomes an act of attention—of remaining with what is real, even when it resists conclusion. He allows both Buber and Bonhoeffer to speak without being gathered too quickly into a single frame.

And in Parker Palmer, one finds a quieter companion still. His work turns gently toward the interior life, toward the conditions required for any true meeting to endure. He reminds us that the space between is not sustained by ideas alone, but by the integrity of the lives that enter it.

These are not authorities to be followed.

They are companions in a shared discipline.

Each, in their own way, resists the urge to make these questions easier than they are. Each helps us remain a little longer in the presence of what cannot be resolved at once.

And perhaps that is the most faithful way to approach both Martin Buber and Dietrich Bonhoeffer—

not by arriving too quickly at what they mean,
but by allowing them still
to meet us.

In the quiet decision, made again and again,
to remain.

To remain long enough, perhaps, to be met.

“And the end of all our exploring
will be to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.”
— T. S. Eliot

Where Scripture Becomes Song

Saint Julian Press — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 12:00:27 GMT

The Last Disclosure ~ Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love ~ Julian of Norwich

When Scripture Speaks in Poetry

How the language of the Bible forms the soul through mystery

Much of the Bible does not argue, explain, or command. It sings like a psalm rising from the human soul. And sometimes it is through these poetic verses that the deepest truths of Scripture reach the human soul.

The poets of the Bible understood something about the human soul that literal language alone cannot reach.

Truth, when spoken only as instruction or statement, may inform the mind. But when truth is spoken in poetry, it begins to take life within us. It enters through image, rhythm, memory, and longing. It moves quietly past argument and settles into the deeper places—into the interior places where spiritual formation actually occurs.

This is why so much of Scripture speaks in poetry.

The Bible does not rely only on commandments, laws, or theological explanations. It sings. It laments. It praises. It questions. It dreams. And through that poetic language, Scripture speaks not only to the intellect, but to the deeper layers of human consciousness and the soul itself.

This is why the way children first encounter Scripture matters so much. When they hear the stories of Noah and the rainbow, of Joseph and his dreams, of David and the shepherd’s sling, or of the Good Samaritan and the lost sheep, they are not simply learning information about religion. They are entering a world of sacred story.

Children’s Bible stories introduce the young heart to Scripture through narrative, symbol, and imagination. Long before theological arguments are possible, the language of story and poetry begins its quiet work. It forms memory. It shapes the moral imagination. It teaches the heart how to recognize grace.

In this way, the earliest encounter with the Bible is already poetic. The stories are seeds planted in the imagination. Over time, they deepen, mature, and unfold into the larger mystery of faith.

This is also why, in the Anglican and Episcopal tradition, Scripture is not only studied but also prayed and sung. The language of the Bible flows through the rhythms of worship, shaping the spiritual life over time.

Much of the Book of Common Prayer itself is drawn directly from the language of Scripture. Its cadences echo the Psalms, the prophets, the Gospels, and the epistles. In this way, the Church continues what the Bible itself began—allowing poetry, prayer, and sacred story to speak to the heart as well as the mind.

The Psalms and the Formation of the Heart

The Psalms do not teach faith as a set of conclusions. They teach faith as a lived experience of the soul before God.

The psalmists speak in metaphor because metaphor allows the heart to recognize itself. God becomes a shepherd, a refuge, a fortress, a mother bird gathering her young beneath sheltering wings. These images do more than describe God; they invite us to dwell within a relationship of trust and dependence.

When we pray the Psalms long enough, something subtle begins to happen. Their language becomes our language. Their longing becomes our longing. Their cry of hope becomes our own interior prayer.

What begins as poetry slowly becomes formation.

The Prophetic Imagination

The prophets understood this as well.

When Isaiah speaks of deserts blossoming, valleys lifted, and mountains made low, he is not merely predicting events. He is reshaping the imagination of a people. The poetry widens the horizon of hope so listeners can begin to see the world through the lens of God’s redeeming work.

Justice appears not as a legal code but as restoration—the setting right of what violence and pride have bent out of shape.

Prophetic poetry opens the human imagination to the possibility that God is already at work in the world, even when history itself appears broken.

Jesus and the Language of Parable

Jesus stands firmly within this same poetic tradition.

Seeds fall into the soil. Lamps shine in dark houses. A shepherd leaves ninety-nine sheep to search for one. A father runs down the road to embrace a returning son. Workers arriving at the final hour receive the same wage as those who labored all day.

These are not theological formulas. They are invitations into a way of seeing.

The listener is not handed a conclusion but drawn toward recognition.

This is the quiet genius of biblical poetry. It does not force belief; it awakens perception.

The soul begins to notice what has always been present.

Poetry and the Mystery of Faith

For this reason, the Church has always prayed its poetry aloud.

Monks rising in the dark to chant the Psalms were not merely preserving tradition. They were allowing Scripture to reshape the interior landscape of the heart. Over time the language of the Psalms becomes the language of the soul itself—teaching us how to grieve, how to rejoice, how to trust when trust feels impossible.

Poetry protects the mystery at the center of faith.

It reminds us that divine truth is not something we master once and for all, but something we grow into slowly.

This contemplative insight echoes through the Christian mystical tradition. The fourteenth-century English mystic Julian of Norwich spoke of divine revelation unfolding gradually within the soul, describing faith not as certainty but as a deepening trust in the mystery of God’s love.

Centuries later, the poet T. S. Eliot would describe the spiritual life as a quiet stillness “at the still point of the turning world,” where deeper perception slowly emerges. In both voices, we hear the same wisdom: divine truth often reveals itself not through force or argument, but through patience, attention, and the slow maturation of the heart.

Poetry resists the straight lines that human judgment so often prefers. Literal language seeks certainty; poetry allows us to remain within the question long enough for wisdom to appear. When the psalmist writes, “Deep calls unto deep,” no definition is offered. Yet something awakens within us. The depths of the human spirit recognize a depth beyond itself.

The Apostle Paul expresses this same mystery of partial understanding and unfolding vision in his well-known words from 1 Corinthians 13:9–12 (NRSVA).

For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; ¹⁰but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹²For now we see in a mirror, dimly,^[^a^] but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

Through metaphor and song, Scripture trains the imagination to perceive God already present in the fabric of existence—in the turning seasons, in sorrow and deliverance, in the fragile beauty of human life.

Mercy and justice appear not as opposing doctrines but as living expressions of the same divine love. The God who defends the widow and the poor is also the One “slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” Poetry holds these truths together without forcing them into rigid conclusions.

In this way, biblical poetry quietly works within us. It softens the impulse to judge too quickly and opens the imagination to a mercy wider than our calculations. It reminds us that divine wisdom exceeds our categories and that the deepest truths about God cannot be codified into inflexible rules.

The Anglican Way of Reading Scripture

Within the Anglican and Episcopal tradition, this way of reading Scripture has long been embraced.

The Bible remains our foundation—understood through Scripture, Tradition, and Reason —and contains all things necessary for salvation. Our worship is filled with Scripture from beginning to end.

In fact, roughly seventy percent of the Book of Common Prayer is drawn directly from the Bible itself.

Yet the Book of Common Prayer does something important with those words. It does not present Scripture only as doctrine or instruction. It gives Scripture a lyrical, rhythmic, and contemplative voice.

The prayers of the Church move like poetry.

Morning and evening prayer flow through psalms, canticles, and readings that allow Scripture to be heard, sung, and prayed again and again across the seasons of life.

In this way, the language of the Bible slowly takes root within the heart of the worshiping community.

Faith is not merely explained.

It is formed.

Over time, the language of the Psalms and the prayers of the Church begin to shape the way we see the world itself. The cadences of Scripture—spoken, sung, and prayed across generations—slowly become part of our inner vocabulary. What once sounded like ancient poetry begins to echo through ordinary moments of life, until the language of faith becomes the language through which we perceive the world.

Learning to See

The poets of Scripture knew that faith does not live in rigid certainty but in attentiveness—a willingness to stand before God with humility, wonder, and trust.

Perhaps that is why their words continue to breathe across the centuries.

They do not close the mystery of God.

They keep it open.

And once we begin to see—even dimly—

the world itself begins
to read
like a psalm
already being sung.

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

THE LAST DISCLOSURE ~ THE SIXTEENTH REVELATION
after Julian of Norwich, Union

     Love was always our Lord’s Meaning. 

And at the end of all sadness 
our eyes shall suddenly open
and within this clarity of sight
uncluttered by yearning
our vision fully transformed
our hope made full 
our desires brought silent
in the mystery of creation

where – God as spirit
where – God as truth
where – God as wayfinder
leads us towards 
our own enlightenment
and knowledge
where – Christ 
as noble teacher

reveals creation’s light
in this clarity, we will see 
and understand—
that faith and compassion 
are our radiances in 
the darkness of night: the light 
which is God, our everlasting day

God is the ground of our beseeching 
And of our being and becoming
Love is her meaning – Love without end
and all shall be well, and all shall be well, 
and all manner of thing shall be well

And this shall be the knowing:
the moment is always now—
not as clock, but as calling.
Eternally present in kairos—
In God's time.
A stillness outside our measuring
where love is never late—
everlasting.

—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Houston, Texas

THE LAST DISCLOSURE ~ THE SIXTEENTH REVELATION
after Julian of Norwich, Union

This poem is from At The Still Point: In Conversation with Saint Julian by Ron Starbuck. Published by Saint Julian Press, Inc. in 2025.

At the Still Point is available from:

Bookshop.org
Barnes & Noble
Amazon

www.saintjulianpress.org

Copyright © 2025
Print ISBN-13: 978-1-955194-45-7
eBook ISBN-13: 978-1-955194-46-4
Cover Image: Chiesa di San Francesco a Pienza
Photo by Ron Starbuck, Pienza, Italy

The Breath That Moves Through the World

Saint Julian Press — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 09:48:59 GMT

Christ in the Desert Monastery ~ New Mexico

I. A Quiet Conviction in the Christian Tradition

There is a quiet conviction running through the older streams of Christian faith—a conviction less like a doctrine to be argued and more like a wind moving through trees. It is the belief that the Holy Spirit is not confined.

Christians speak naturally of the Spirit as the life of the Church. The Spirit gathers the faithful in prayer, breathes through Scripture proclaimed, and consecrates the humble elements of bread and wine. In worship, the Church becomes aware again of a presence that has always been there, animating its life.

Yet the same Christian tradition that speaks of the Spirit within the Church also gestures outward toward something larger. The Spirit, many Christians believe, moves through the world as well.

Not always loudly, nor in ways believers immediately recognize. But wherever truth is sought with sincerity, wherever compassion interrupts indifference, and wherever estranged people attempt the difficult work of reconciliation, many Christians have long believed that the Spirit is already present.

II. The Biblical Roots of This Belief

This understanding does not arise merely from sentiment. It emerges from the witness of Scripture itself.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus compares the Spirit to the wind, saying that it “blows where it chooses.” No one commands it, and no one confines it. One may hear its movement, but its origin and destination remain mysterious.

The early Church encountered this mystery repeatedly. In the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples discover that God’s Spirit often moves ahead of them. The Spirit appears among strangers, outsiders, and people beyond the expected boundaries of faith.

The apostles must pause, reconsider, and acknowledge what is unfolding before them. Again and again they come to the same realization: God is already at work.

The Church does not bring the Spirit into the world. The Church learns to recognize where the Spirit has been moving all along.

III. Reflections from Christian Theology

Christian thinkers across the centuries have reflected on this mystery. The great North African bishop Augustine of Hippo spoke of divine grace as something that could not be reduced to institutional boundaries alone. God’s presence, Augustine suggested, could be encountered wherever hearts were turned toward truth and love.

Later theologians continued to explore this insight, recognizing that the grace of God may stir within the human conscience long before it is formally named within religious language.

Within sacramental traditions such as the Anglican Communion, the Episcopal Church, Roman Catholicism, Orthodox churches, Methodists, Lutherans, and other Protestant traditions, this understanding takes on a particular form. The Church is not seen as a fortress containing God. Rather, it is understood as a visible sign of grace within the world—a place where the presence of God becomes especially clear.

IV. The Kingdom and Reign of God Already Breaking Into the World

This perspective flows naturally from the Christian understanding of the Kingdom of God—or, as many theologians also describe it, God’s Reign. The language is metaphorical, drawn from the political vocabulary of the ancient world, yet pointing beyond earthly systems of rule.

God’s Reign is not merely a distant future descending suddenly from the heavens. It is also a present reality quietly appearing within the life of the world.

Christians glimpse this Reign wherever life reflects the character of divine love. It appears when compassion overcomes indifference, when justice replaces exploitation, and when enemies seek reconciliation rather than revenge.

A physician sitting patiently beside a suffering patient. A teacher refusing cynicism and continuing to believe in the young. A stranger offering kindness to someone they may never see again.

In such moments, Christians see signs that something greater is already stirring within creation.

V. Living in the “Already and Not Yet”

Theologians often describe this tension with the phrase Already and Not Yet.

God’s Reign has already begun through the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The Spirit is already present within the Church and at work within the world.

Yet the fullness of that Reign has not yet arrived. Justice remains incomplete, suffering continues, and human history still struggles toward healing.

Christians therefore live between promise and fulfillment. The Spirit moves ahead of the Church, within the Church, and beyond the Church, drawing creation slowly toward redemption.

This vision requires humility. It reminds believers that divine grace cannot be possessed or controlled. It must instead be recognized wherever it appears.

VI. The Church as a Window

For sacramental Christians, the Church becomes a kind of window through which divine light becomes visible.

In baptism, the Spirit marks a life with belonging. In the Eucharist, ordinary bread and wine become signs of a deeper reality in which time itself opens toward eternity. In prayer, the Church learns attentiveness to the movement of God within history.

Yet the Spirit who animates the Church is the same Spirit who breathes through creation itself.

The Church does not own that breath. It bears witness to it.

VII. Recognizing the Spirit

The same breath that moved over the waters at creation continues to move through the world. It filled the disciples with courage at Pentecost, and it still stirs within human hearts today.

Wherever truth is pursued, wherever compassion appears, and wherever reconciliation becomes possible, many Christians believe the Spirit is already at work.

The task of the Church, then, is not to claim control over that mystery. Its task is quieter and perhaps more demanding.

The Church must learn to recognize the breath of God when it moves.

VIII. The Mystery of the End

For this reason, Christians must approach the language of the end of time with humility and restraint. The dramatic imagery of the Book of Revelation, including the vision of Armageddon, belongs to a deeply symbolic and poetic tradition within Scripture. Like the visions found in the Book of Daniel, these passages speak through layered imagery meant to awaken faith rather than provide a literal script for world events.

Because of this, the ideas of Armageddon or the “Rapture” must never become arguments for war or be used to confuse God’s Reign with the politics of any nation-state. The reign of God cannot be reduced to the ambitions or conflicts of earthly powers.

Christian faith has long held that the moment of Christ’s return remains intentionally hidden within divine wisdom. As the Gospel of Matthew reminds believers, no one knows the day or the hour. The future of God’s Reign remains a mystery known fully only to heaven.

The language of Scripture, therefore, asks to be read with reverence and patience. It carries multiple layers of meaning that must be held together in tension, inviting contemplation rather than certainty.

Until that day arrives, Christians are called to live faithfully within the mystery of the Already and Not Yet, trusting that God’s Reign is already unfolding within the world even as its fullness still lies ahead.

In that space between promise and fulfillment, the Church waits, watches, and continues the quiet work of truth, compassion, and reconciliation.

Ron Starbuck
Publisher, Saint Julian Press
Houston, Texas

Christ is Already Among Us

Saint Julian Press — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 16:25:02 GMT

Morrow Chapel ~ Trinity Episcopal Church ~ Midtown Houston

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” ~ Saint Julian of Norwich

I. A Poet’s Reflection

We live in a time when the language of prophecy returns easily to the public square.

Wars, alliances, and the tremors of nations stir old questions in the human imagination. When the world grows uncertain, the ancient symbols of Scripture—trumpets, clouds, sudden arrivals—rise again in the mind.

Yet the Church has always spoken of these things with humility.

Christ himself reminds us that no one knows the day or the hour. The unfolding of history remains within the hidden wisdom of God. The mystery of the Second Coming is not a puzzle we are meant to solve, nor a timetable we are meant to decipher.

What we have been given instead are symbols—living metaphors that shape the soul and form the conscience. Scripture offers them not so that we may predict the end of history, but so that we may learn how to live faithfully within it. They belong to the work of Christian spiritual formation.

There is danger when such symbols are pressed too quickly into the service of politics—when wars are imagined as sacred necessities, or when modern leaders are cast into the roles of ancient kings, as though conflict itself were somehow a pathway to redemption.

It is not.

The Gospel moves in another direction.

The Christ we await is the same Christ who blesses the peacemakers, who heals the wounded, and who gathers the broken world into mercy.

And so the Church lives differently within time.

We are given the sacraments.

At the table of the Eucharist, bread is broken and wine is shared. In that quiet act the Church remembers something the world easily forgets: that Christ is already present among us.

Past, present, and future meet there.

The Cross remembered.
The living Christ encountered.
The Mystery glimpsed.

The eternal presses gently against the present moment.

Christians, therefore, do not wait for chaos as though it were a doorway to redemption. We live instead within the quiet unfolding of God’s grace—seeking reconciliation, practicing mercy, tending the fragile work of peace.

And in every Eucharist, the Church hears the ancient words that steady our too-frail human hearts:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Until that day—whenever and however it may come—we live within the promise that the Reign of God is nearer than we imagine, and already beginning to bloom among us. We are asked to live within its mystery now.

II. A Brief Word on the History of the “Rapture”

The modern teaching commonly known as the Rapture did not emerge in the earliest centuries of Christianity. It appeared much later, in the nineteenth century, through the teaching of John Nelson Darby, associated with the Plymouth Brethren.

Darby developed a theological framework later known as Dispensationalism, in which history was divided into distinct eras of God’s activity. Within this system, he proposed that Christ might return in two stages: first to gather believers in a sudden removal from the earth, and later in a visible return in judgment.

This interpretation spread widely in the United States through the influence of Cyrus I. Scofield and the publication of the Scofield Reference Bible, whose notes helped popularize Darby’s prophetic framework.

Over time, the idea moved beyond theological circles into popular culture, where it became widely associated with end-times speculation.

Yet it is important to understand that this interpretation represents one modern reading of certain biblical passages, not the consensus of the historic Christian tradition going back two thousand years.

Living Within Christ’s Mercy & Mystery

For most of Christian history, the Church confessed that Christ will come again in glory and mercy, leaving the details of that mystery within the wisdom of God.

In the twentieth century, another development quietly reshaped the Christian imagination. Across many Protestant traditions—and within Anglican and Catholic theology as well—the emphasis gradually shifted away from visions of divine wrath toward a deeper meditation on God's mercy. Voices once neglected were rediscovered, including the fourteenth-century mystic Julian of Norwich, whose luminous confidence in the boundless love of God spoke powerfully to a modern age.

Her famous assurance—“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well”—did not deny the reality of suffering or judgment. Rather, it placed them within a larger horizon of divine mercy. In this renewed theological vision, the Christian hope came to be understood less as an escape from the world and more as the healing and reconciliation of creation itself.

It is within this renewed vision of mercy and reconciliation that the Church’s sacramental life finds its deepest meaning.

III. The Sacramental Vision of the Church

Within the great sacramental traditions of Christianity—including the Anglican tradition expressed in The Episcopal Church—the emphasis has been placed less on predicting the end of history and more on recognizing the presence of Christ within history, and within our lives here and now.

This vision finds its deepest expression in the Eucharist.

Anglican theology speaks of the Real Presence of Christ in the sacrament—not as a mechanism to be explained, but as a mystery to be received with reverence.

In the Eucharist, past, present, and future gather together.

The past: the saving work of Christ remembered.
The present: the living Christ encountered.
The future: the Kingdom of God anticipated.

The Eucharist becomes a glimpse of eternity breaking gently into time—a foretaste of the reconciliation toward which all creation moves.

Christian theology has often described this mystery with the phrase “already and not yet.” In Christ, the Reign of God has already begun—present in grace, in mercy, and in the life of the Church. Yet the fullness of that Reign is not yet complete. The Eucharist therefore becomes a sign of both realities: God’s Reign already present among us, and God’s Reign still unfolding toward its final fulfillment.

IV. Living Within the Mystery

Because of this sacramental vision of the Kingdom already present and yet still unfolding, Christians are not called to welcome chaos as though it were necessary for God’s purposes.

The longing for Christ’s return is not a longing for war. It is longing for God’s peace.

The Gospel points us instead toward reconciliation, compassion, and the healing of nations. Christians are asked to become instruments of peace and reconciliation within the world, not agents of chaos.

The Church therefore lives with a quiet confidence: that the Reign of God is already unfolding in ways both visible and hidden, and that Christian life is lived within what theologians often describe as the mystery of “already and not yet.”

The mystery of Christ is already among us.

And the Reign of God we await is nearer than we may imagine.

V. Where Eternity Touches Time

Nowhere is this mystery more beautifully expressed than in the Eucharist.

In the worship of The Episcopal Church and other Sacramental Christian traditions, we gather as a community of faith around bread and wine with the quiet confidence that Christ is truly present now.

Anglican theology has long spoken of this as the Real Presence—not as a mechanism to be explained, but as a mystery to be received.

This conviction is shared across the great sacramental traditions of Christianity—including the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, and Lutheran traditions—each speaking of the mystery in its own theological language.

In the Eucharist, time itself opens, and the eternal mystery becomes known.

The past is present: the saving work of Christ remembered and proclaimed.
The present is illuminated: the living Christ encountered among the gathered faithful.
The future draws near: the promised feast of God’s Reign glimpsed in sacramental form.

In that moment, past, present, and future meet and become one.

Worship becomes a small opening in time through which eternity quietly shines.

VI. The Temptation to Turn Prophecy into Politics

In some corners of modern religious life, another impulse has appeared—the suggestion that world events, particularly wars in the Middle East, must be interpreted as necessary steps toward prophetic fulfillment.

Occasionally, our political leaders have been compared to Cyrus the Great, whose actions in ancient history served God’s purposes for Israel.

But such comparisons become dangerous when they are used to sanctify conflict or to suggest that war itself might hasten the coming of Christ.

The Christian longing for the Kingdom is not a longing for catastrophe.

It is a longing for reconciliation.

VII. The Spirit’s Quiet Work

The Holy Spirit moves through history not as the architect of destruction but as the giver of life.

The Holy Spirit mends communities, softens hearts, and draws creation toward renewal.

Where forgiveness takes root,
where justice is sought,
where compassion breaks through indifference
—there God’s Reign and mercy quietly appear.

VIII. The Hope That Surrounds Us

The Christian hope is quieter than the headlines sometimes suggest.

Each time the Eucharist is celebrated, believers glimpse the truth again.

Bread is broken.
Wine is shared.
Christ is present.

And in that moment, the Church remembers that the Kingdom of God is not merely a distant horizon.

It surrounds us even now.

The eternal presses gently against the present.

The reign of God moves quietly among us.

And so the faithful continue their work—praying, serving, healing, reconciling—trusting that the mystery already unfolding will one day be revealed in fullness.

Until that day, the Church lives by a simple promise:

Christ is with us.
Christ will come again.

And the God’s Reign which we await in faithfulness already begins to bloom among us—nearer than the bread broken in our hands.

Ron Starbuck
Publisher, Saint Julian Press
Houston, Texas
March 6, 2026

Beyond the Question: A Reflection on Time, Trust, and the Greater Mystery

Saint Julian Press — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 09:54:00 GMT

The Threshold — Chiesa di Santa Maria Assunta — Castelmuzio SI, Italy

Beyond the Question: A Meditation on Time, Trust, and the Greater Mystery

Before we ever asked whether God exists or not, we belonged to the wind. To the breath. To the hush before words, and the warmth of sun on skin. We belonged to the sacred long before we gave it a name.

The question—“Does God exist?”—once meant everything. It built cathedrals. It lit fires. It divided tribes, doctrines, and neighbors. But it’s a question that comes too late. It’s a question that assumes we’re outside the mystery, when we’ve always been inside it. It is being itself. It is living our lives with a sense of mystery, knowing that we are not alone and that there is something more, even if we cannot name it for now.

The mystery is - it exists - it is an intimate part of who we are, because we are known by it in ways we may not yet see or understand.

The Limits of Either/Or

There’s a kind of thinking that we inherited like old furniture—heavy, carved from thick oak, passed down through generations that meant well but didn’t question much. It’s the thinking that divides the world into two and asks us to pick a side.

Truth or falsehood.

Faith or doubt.

Male or female.

Sacred or secular.

Heaven or hell.

God exists, or God doesn’t.

It’s clean, efficient, and deeply comforting—until it isn’t. Because eventually, we all live long enough to realize that life doesn’t behave. It doesn’t sort itself neatly into the categories we were taught to use. And neither, it turns out, do we.

Binary thinking has its uses. It helps children understand and cope with danger. It enables computers to perform their tasks. It offers the illusion of control in a chaotic world.

But binary thinking can’t hold the weight of a mystery. And life, when you look at it sideways, is mostly mystery.

A dying parent who still makes you laugh. A moment of beauty in the middle of war. A person you were taught to fear who becomes your friend. A season of doubt that leaves you closer to God than you’ve ever been. A stranger who smiles at you in the grocery store. These are not contradictions to be solved. They are thresholds. Invitations. The ground where genuine faith begins.

The Middle Way and the Sacred Depth

There’s a word for this in Buddhist teaching: the middle way.

Not in the sense of compromise, but in the sense of wisdom that refuses reduction.

The middle way sees reality as dynamic and interconnected. It doesn’t ask whether something is this or that. It asks: What is it becoming? How is it connected? What is unfolding here?

Christian theologian Paul Tillich gestured toward this same openness when he described God not as a “being” but as Being-Itself. Not an object to be proven or disproven, but the Ground of Being, the depth from which all life arises and into which all returns.

Tillich insisted that the question is not whether God exists in some binary sense. The question is: What are you being drawn toward when you love the world? What do you touch when you fall silent in awe?

This shifts us from religion as an argument to spirituality as a form of participation.

Even science is shifting its vocabulary. Particle and wave. Light and shadow. Time and space are a single fabric that bends and stretches. Matter as vibration. Energy as probability. Truth in quantum terms is no longer an answer—it’s a pattern. A dance. A question in motion.

And poets, well… the poets have always known.

A Theology of Listening: Enter Paul F. Knitter

This isn’t just a poetic idea—it’s a theological one.

Pluralist theologian Paul F. Knitter has spent a lifetime listening to the world’s religious traditions as if they were different windows looking out on the same vast mystery. He writes not with the anxiety of someone trying to defend his corner of truth, but with the generosity of someone who has seen the light change as he moves between windows.

In his book Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, Knitter confesses that Christianity alone could no longer carry the full weight of his experience of the Sacred. It was through Buddhist practice—through stillness, breath, and the awareness of interbeing—that he found a way to return to the heart of Christ with greater depth and clarity, not in contradiction, but in communion.

What Knitter reminds us is that truth is not fragile. It doesn’t shatter when it comes into contact with another tradition. It expands. It deepens. It opens.

And perhaps the question is not Which religion is right? But instead, what happens when your soul is stretched by the truths of more than one tradition? Maybe the Divine has always spoken in more than one language.

The Sacred may not be a gate to guard, but a river to enter. Knitter calls this a mutual liberation:

Where Christians are liberated from exclusivism.

Where Buddhists are liberated from detachment.

Where each tradition becomes more fully itself by encountering the other.

This isn’t theological relativism. It’s theological reverence.

A reverence for the Sacred that is always deeper than our categories.

How We Might Begin Again

We stop building arguments and start building altars. In our kitchens. In our relationships. In our neighborhoods, amid our neighbors. In the streets. In the quiet interior places, we’ve forgotten how to visit.

This is not the abandonment of belief. It is its deepening. It is faith without the sharp edges. Faith with a velvet underside. Faith that can hold space for doubt, and difference, and change. It is the kind of faith that doesn’t ask you to nail down what’s true forever, but to walk with humility inside a universe that is always becoming.

To say not “I know,” but ”I am listening.”

Not “I have the answer,” but ”I am here.”

A Blessing for Those in Between

For the ones standing at the threshold, not certain which way to go—may you find courage in the cloudiness.

For the ones who left the old words behind, but haven’t found the new ones yet—may silence speak to you with kindness.

For the ones tired of taking sides, who long for a wider circle—may your soul remember the shape of wholeness. And may you live, not in the binary, but in the bloom. Not in the answer, but in the sacred middle of all things.

How Do We Shift the Paradigm

So, how do we shift? How do we begin to see the world, not in black-and-white certainty, but in the color of unfolding? We start by paying attention.

To the space between thoughts. To the breath between words. To the way a child asks a question without needing to own the answer.

We begin by trusting that not all tension needs to be resolved. Sometimes, what we need is not clarity, but companionship within the mystery. We stop asking, Is this sacred or not? And start asking, What makes it so hard for me to see the holy here?

We stop assuming that everything real can be proven. We allow beauty, love, and grief to count as ways of knowing.

You Are Welcome at the Table

And for some of us, that altar is also a table. In the Episcopal Church, that table is always open and open to all. Not because everyone understands it. Not because everyone agrees. But because the Holy Spirit is already at work in everyone who comes forward, whether they know the right words or not.

This sacred rite and practice—open or free communion—is not an erasure of boundaries. It is a recognition of belonging that precedes belief. It is the echo of Jesus breaking bread without prerequisites. It is a sacrament not as a gate, but as a wellspring of divine welcome.

The Eucharist is not a reward for good theology. It is a mystery for the hungry, for the hesitant, for the hopeful. And in that mystery, bread becomes body, wine becomes blood, and strangers become kin. Not because we explain it, but because we enter it.

It is once more a walk with humility, a pathway we already know, dwelling within creation, which is constantly evolving and becoming. In this spiritual practice (praxis) of living, we say not “I know,” but ”I am listening.” Not “I have the answer,” but “I am here.”

Do you see the difference this makes in any dialogue?

Written within us as prayer,
God utters our name — without ceasing.

Written within —
not ink, not syllable,
but breath —
a single word uttered
prior to speech.

Before we answer,
before we rise or refuse,
there is this:
our name
held in the mouth of God.

Not once.
Not only at baptism
or burial.
But without ceasing.

As tide against shore,
as light touching stone,
as the pulse beneath the wrist —
the Holy
utters us.

And what we call prayer
may simply be
the echo
of being spoken.

So even in our forgetting,
when language thins
and faith feels distant,
farther than the farthest star,

the utterance remains.

Beneath anger.
Beneath doubt.
Beneath the long ache
of history and harm.

Our name
still rising
in the breath of God.

Not as demand.
Not as decree.
But as gift —

again
and again
and again.

—Ron Starbuck, Publisher

Saint Julian Press, Inc.

Houston, Texas

This essay was researched and developed with the assistance of OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus service to verify facts, sources, and historical context.

Sources & Further Reading

Paul Tillich, The New Being — Sermons on the “Ground of Being” and the New Creation.

Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian — A personal journey into interfaith transformation.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark — On doubt, trust, and finding God beyond certainty.

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding — A poetic introduction to the Buddhist idea of interbeing.

Peggy Noonan, What I Saw at the Revolution — For voice and tone: personal, lyrical, clear.

Arthur Zajonc, Catching the Light — A physicist’s reflection on light, mystery, and the limits of binary thought.

The Episcopal Church. “Holy Eucharist: The Principal Act of Christian Worship.” The Episcopal Church.

Returning Home: The Still Point of Grace

Saint Julian Press — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 13:04:00 GMT

Somewhere along the way, many of us were taught that faith must be certain in order to be true.

Certain about where the road begins.
Certain about where it ends.
Certain about who walks it rightly.

Certainty was offered as shelter—solid, protective, unmoving.

But faith has always been more like this road: a narrow path between old stones, a quiet walk beneath branches that have outlived our arguments, figures moving forward into light they cannot yet see.

Long before we named our debates about absolutes and ambiguity, there was a garden, a departure, and a promise.

There was exile.
And there was return.

If sin is real—and it is—the deeper question may not be whether we have wandered, but whether grace is already moving toward us along the same way.

Perhaps the truest assurance is not found in tightening our grip on answers, but in discovering that even as we walk into the distance, we are already being gathered home.

Returning Home

An Older Grammar of Grace

If sin is separation, then salvation must be return.

That sentence carries within it two very different grammars of faith. One begins with corruption and moves toward rescue. The other begins with covenant and moves toward restoration. Both take sin seriously. Both speak of grace. But they imagine the human story differently.

Within more Calvinist streams of Protestant thought, the human condition is often defined first by depravity. The fall is not merely an event; it is an inheritance. Salvation becomes rescue from what we are by nature. Certainty must be strong. The ground must be firm. If human nature is unreliable, assurance must come from somewhere outside us—declared, secured, guaranteed.

That instinct deserves respect. It arises not from harshness, but from a longing for solidity in a fragile world. If the heart is wayward, if history is unstable, if culture drifts, then faith must anchor itself in something unshakable. A personal relationship with Jesus Christ becomes that anchor. A daily walk with Jesus becomes the lived assurance that one is not lost.

Anglicanism does not deny this longing. It, too, speaks of walking with Christ. But it places that walk within a different rhythm—one shaped by sacrament, liturgy, and contemplative depth. The Way of Jesus unfolds not only in the language of decision, but in the language of offering. It is not less personal; it is more spacious.

And here, an older thread begins to show.

Teshuvah: Return, Not Ruin

In Jewish tradition, the word for repentance is teshuvah—return.

Return to covenant.
Return to God.
Return to the path from which we have wandered.

Teshuvah assumes something profound: the human being remains capable of return because the divine image is not erased. Sin wounds relationship, but it does not annihilate it. The breach is real, but so is the bond.

This is not sentimental. Teshuvah demands confession, restitution, repair. But it does not begin with metaphysical collapse. It begins with covenantal dignity.

Alongside teshuvah stands tikkun olam—the repair of the world. Creation is fractured; human beings participate in its healing. The world is not abandoned as hopeless; it is entrusted to us as vocation.

Return and repair.

Read this way, Genesis is not primarily a treatise on inherited guilt. It is a story of exile and longing, rupture and restoration. The garden is lost—but the story unfolds toward return.

This grammar resonates deeply with Anglican prayer.

We confess.
We are absolved.
We are invited to the table.

Grace precedes merit. Communion is not a reward for the righteous; it is medicine for the wounded soul.

The Middle Way Is Not Indecision

Anglicanism has often been described as a via media—a middle way. Too often, that phrase is misunderstood as compromise. In truth, it is a disciplined refusal to let one truth eclipse another.

Sin is real.
Grace is deeper.

Doctrine matters.
Mystery remains.

In the nineteenth century, the Oxford Movement sought to recover sacramental depth at a time when Anglicanism risked becoming thin and merely rational. Figures such as John Henry Newman, Edward Bouverie Pusey, and John Keble called the Church back to reverence, beauty, and the patristic imagination.

They were not abandoning truth. They were reclaiming mystery.

Worship itself, they believed, forms belief. Liturgy shapes theology. Kneeling at the altar teaches what argument alone cannot.

This sacramental renewal helped shape Anglican liturgy into the twentieth century and remains embedded in the rhythms of the Prayer Book today: confession and absolution, Word and table, time gathered into eternity.

Imagination as Faithfulness

The same confidence animated George MacDonald, whose stories did not dilute Christian faith but deepened it. His imaginative theology influenced the Oxford circle later known as the Inklings, including C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien.

MacDonald did not argue people into belief. He formed them through story.

Lewis spoke of his imagination being “baptized.” That phrase matters. The mind may reason its way to assent, but imagination must be healed for faith to become luminous. Orthodoxy need not be stripped of wonder to remain true.

Centuries earlier, Julian of Norwich spoke of sin as “behovable”—not because it is good, but because it becomes the place where mercy is revealed. She does not deny fracture. She refuses to grant it ultimacy.

T. S. Eliot heard her clearly. In Four Quartets, he echoes her assurance: “All shall be well.” At the still point of the turning world, time and eternity meet. The fire that purifies is not destruction; it is love burning away illusion.

The mystics recognized one another across centuries. They shared a grammar: God is not finally known through control, but through encounter.

Salvation Within and Beyond Time

Evangelical spirituality often emphasizes decisive moments: surrender, assurance, and personal conversion. Anglican spirituality often emphasizes sustained rhythms: confession, Eucharist, and contemplation.

The difference may lie less in destination than in tempo.

One highlights the immediacy of grace.
The other its continuity.

In the Eucharist, time is opened. Past, present, and future converge. Salvation unfolds within time and yet participates in eternity. The still point is not an escape from history; it is the place where history is gathered.

This vision echoes in my own work, At the Still Point, a poetic response shaped by Julian and Eliot’s contemplative theology. The still point is not an abstraction. It is consent. It is the place where doctrine bows to encounter, where sin is acknowledged, and mercy received.

Truth is not threatened by poetry.
Mystery does not diminish love.

A Bridge, Not a Rebuke

These reflections are offered as a quiet meditation on a deeper confidence—one shaped by grace, unfolding not through grasping but through abiding, held within communion and sustained by love.

The evangelical who walks daily with Jesus and the Anglican who kneels at the altar are not strangers. Both confess need. Both rely on grace. Both long for union.

The older grammar of faith—return and repair, covenant and communion, story and sacrament—offers a wider field.

Sin is real.
Grace is deeper.
Love is the truest name of God.

At the still point—where time and eternity meet—we discover that certainty is not possession. It is trust.

All shall be well.

Not because we have mastered doctrine.
But because we have been gathered into grace.

—Ron Starbuck
Publisher ~ Saint Julian Press
Houston, Texas

Saint Julian Press. (2026). Returning Home: The Still Point of Grace, © 2026 Saint Julian Press. February 15, 2026, essay publication.

If this essay helps bring clarity to your thoughts and others’, please feel free to share it with someone.

Anglican & Theological Sources

The Book of Common Prayer. New York: Church Publishing, 1979.

Hooker, Richard. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. 1593.

Van Dusen, Henry P. The Gospel and the Catholic Church. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1937.

Mystical & Contemplative Voices

Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Circa 1395.

Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943.

Merton, Thomas. New Seeds of Contemplation. New York: New Directions, 1961.

Imagination & Formation

MacDonald, George. Phantastes. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1858.

Lewis, C. S. The Great Divorce. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945.

Taylor, Barbara Brown. An Altar in the World. New York: HarperOne, 2009.

Jewish Thought & Covenant

Sacks, Jonathan. To Heal a Fractured World. New York: Schocken, 2005.

Green, Alan Lew. This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2003.

The Quiet Authority of Words

Saint Julian Press — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 16:44:00 GMT

The world grows loud in ways that do not heal. Words are spent quickly now, flung like stones, emptied of care. In such a season, it is worth remembering that not every faithful response needs to be forceful. Some forms of resistance take the shape of attention. Others take the shape of patience. Still others take the shape of words spoken carefully, as if they matter—because they do.

When we say the pen is mightier than the sword, we are speaking less about power than about trust—trust that what is planted quietly may yet bear fruit; trust that the human heart is still capable of being formed rather than coerced. The sword acts upon the body. The pen addresses the soul. This is reflection, not radicalization. It works slowly, as grace often does, shaping the interior life where conscience is awakened and kept alive.

Writing—poetry, prose, the long and careful essay—is not an escape from the world’s wounds. It is a way of remaining present to them without becoming hardened by them. Literature attends. It listens. It remembers. Where violence seeks to sever us from our better selves, writing restores connection—to memory, to meaning, to one another. In this way, writing becomes sacramental: an outward act that carries an inward grace.

Poetry, especially, teaches us how to be still long enough to see. It returns us to breath and silence, to the weight of a single word, to the holiness hidden in ordinary things. In a culture that rushes past grief and flattens hope into sentiment, poetry dares to linger. It refuses to reduce human life to a slogan. It honors the mystery that each person carries, even when the world has forgotten how.

“It may be that when we no longer know what to do,
we have come to our real work,
and when we no longer know which way to go,
we have begun our real journey.”
— Wendell Berry

This is not confusion masquerading as wisdom. It is humility—the soil in which moral imagination takes root. Literature does not rush us toward answers; it teaches us how to remain open long enough to be changed.

Prose gathers what has been scattered. It does the quiet work of mending—bringing fragments into relation, restoring coherence where fear has frayed it. This is not the certainty of dogma, but the steadiness of a well-told story. Prose reminds us that meaning is not manufactured; it is received, shaped by patience and care.

The essay belongs to the life of the community. It stands in the open space between thought and responsibility, offering reflection rather than command. At its best, the essay is a form of hospitality—an invitation to sit with an idea, to consider it slowly, to remain in conversation rather than retreat into camps. This is a deeply pastoral act, especially in a time when outrage has replaced listening.

Such reading reshapes our interiority. It changes how we know. Deep reading opens us to the infinite possibilities already present within creation—possibilities not imposed by force, but disclosed through attention. Literature enlarges our moral imagination, training us to recognize justice not merely as procedure, but as relationship; mercy not as weakness, but as the deepest form of strength.

Scripture names this quietly: faith is the evidence of things unseen.
Literature trains us to live as if this were true—not by denying doubt, but by learning how to dwell faithfully within it.

“We are not sure.
Yet we act as if we were.”
— Denise Levertov

Faith, here, is not certainty. It is courage. It is the willingness to love, to attend, and to remain answerable to the unseen good before it is proven safe.

This understanding is not new. Long before modern regimes learned to fear journalists or poets, William Shakespeareplaced the insight plainly in Hamlet:

“Many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills.”
— William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Power has always understood—sometimes better than the people it governs—that language shapes conscience, and conscience limits force.

Such writing resists not by shouting, but by blessing. It refuses contempt. It declines the easy satisfaction of being right at the cost of being human. This restraint is not timidity. It is moral discipline—the understanding that how we speak shapes who we become.

History teaches that regimes fear writers not because writers topple governments, but because they keep watch over the soul of a people. Words preserve memory. Memory preserves judgment. Judgment, in time, preserves freedom. Long before laws are broken or defended, something quieter happens: a person recognizes that what is being normalized is not, in fact, good.

To write, then, is an act of fidelity. Fidelity to truth. Fidelity to language. Fidelity to the belief that the human heart can still be addressed rather than manipulated. Writing chooses formation over force, care over conquest, patience over panic.

The pen is mightier than the sword because it does not wound in order to win. It heals in order to endure. Every honest poem, every carefully tended sentence, every essay written in good faith becomes a small sacrament of resistance—an offering placed quietly into the world, trusting that grace, once given, will do its work.

A Closing Word on the Phrase

The phrase itself comes from Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1839 historical play Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. In Act II, Scene II, Cardinal Richelieu—having uncovered a plot against the King—articulates a vision of power rooted not in violence, but in language, conscience, and restraint.

The full passage reads:

“True, this!—
Beneath the rule of men entirely great,
The pen is mightier than the sword. Behold
The arch-enchanter’s wand!—itself a nothing!—
But taking sorcery from the master-hand
To paralyze the Cæsars—and to strike
The loud earth breathless!—Take away the sword—
States can be saved without it!”

Read slowly, the claim is neither sentimental nor naïve. It is moral realism. Force may command obedience, but words shape memory. Memory forms judgment. And judgment, over time, governs the moral life of a people.

That is why the pen endures.
Not because it conquers—
but because it forms.

Editor’s Note

“Faith is the evidence of things unseen” comes from Epistle to the Hebrews 11:1. Denise Levertov returns to this truth throughout her poetry, not as doctrine, but as lived tension—faith practiced without guarantees. The reflections offered here stand within that same tension, trusting that careful words, patiently given, still do their quiet work.

—Ron Starbuck
Publisher ~ Saint Julian Press
Houston, Texas

Saint Julian Press. (2026). The Quiet Authority of Words ~ Literature, Interiority, and the Moral Imagination, © 2026 Saint Julian Press. January 21, 2026, essay publication.

If this essay helps bring clarity to your thoughts and others’, please feel free to share it with someone in Congress or anyone as a reminder.

Something More Important ~ Than Dividing a Church or a Nation into Conservatives and Liberals

Saint Julian Press — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 12:01:47 GMT

Clarice L. Osborne Memorial Chapel ~ Baker University, Baldwin City, Kansas

Something More Important

Than Dividing a Church or a Nation into Conservatives and Liberals
~ Rev. Robert P. Starbuck, Mdiv., PhD

And behold, there was a man with a withered hand. And they asked him, “Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?” so that they might accuse him. He said to them, “What man of you, if he has one sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value is a man than a sheep! So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” Then he said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.” And the man stretched it out, and it was restored, whole like the other. But the Pharisees went out and took counsel against him, how to destroy him.
— Matthew 12:10–14

Something More Important

On Sunday morning, June 28th, I awoke to the sound of birds singing in the trees. The morning sun had already found its way across the foot of my bed. It had been a restful night—no fans, no air conditioning—only the cool breeze of a summer night, eight hundred miles north of Houston. I woke knowing that this would be a very special day.

There was still hay in the field that had been cut the day before. It needed to be baled and stored in the barn. We were at Edna’s parents’ farm, and I am sure her seventy-five-year-old father thought about that hay as he rose that morning. In his own way, he likely wished it were already safe for the winter. Even so, if the thought crossed his mind, it did not linger long—because something more important was about to happen.

That day marked fifty years of married life.

Edna’s brother and his wife arrived shortly after 7:30 a.m. All of us were getting dressed for Morning Worship, which began at 8:30. By the time everyone was ready—about 8:15—Edna’s father was pacing the floor. I was pacing with him. He was not accustomed to waiting. I could sense his impatience, though he said nothing. After all, this was a special day. Something more important.

Soon we were in the cars, driving north over a hill or two until we reached one of the main roads running east and west. We turned right, and within half a mile we arrived at St. John Lutheran Church—the church where Edna and I were married, and where her parents had stood together in holy matrimony one-half century earlier. As a large family, we filled an entire pew. In a small rural setting, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone knew why we were there. Worship that morning felt especially fitting, setting the tone for the day that lay ahead.

That afternoon, young and old, rich and poor, relatives and friends gathered in the parish hall across the road. They came to celebrate—to offer congratulations and to add their blessings. The best man and the maid of honor—the two who had stood with them fifty years earlier—were present. The fields lay silent that day, untouched by man or machinery.

Something more important was taking place.

It is a gift, every now and then, to stop moving in this busy world and join others in a great event or celebration. Such moments remind us that while we belong to the infinite, we remain finite creatures. Life interrupts us.

Sometimes death interrupts our lives—the death of someone we love. Sometimes illness interrupts us: an emergency operation, or even a routine tonsillectomy.

Just the other evening, I had scheduled two appointments and a meeting for eight o’clock. At approximately 5:40 p.m., the phone rang. Our oldest daughter needed help. She had a high fever—a complication following her tonsillectomy two weeks earlier. We later discovered she had a severe inner-ear infection. I canceled my appointments without hesitation, because something more important had taken precedence.

Something More Important Than Our Divisions

Consider the story of a senior pastor at a large Methodist church in Houston. I spoke with him just last Monday, along with three other ministers. He shared with us a troubling experience.

A letter had gone out from his office at the end of May asking the congregation to continue their church pledges through December, as the Conference had adopted a fiscal year beginning January 1st. (If you recall, we addressed this issue last fall and were ahead of many churches.) In any case, the request seemed reasonable.

Shortly afterward, he received a letter from one layperson canceling a pledge because the church was too liberal. The very next day, another letter arrived canceling a pledge because the church was too conservative.

In a moment of deep frustration, he cried out, “What am I to do?”

That question may seem trivial to some, but to him it was very real. It was not simply a financial concern. It was pastoral. What am I to do?

I wish I could have given him the answer. I have an answer—but not the answer.

My answer to him, to you, and to myself is this:

There is something more important.

There is something more important than dividing a church—or a nation—into conservatives and liberals.

Those two words have come to trouble me deeply. They are overused, and we are obsessed with them. I do not believe a Christian can be only one or the other. We must, in fact, be both.

We must conserve and liberate at the same time.

We can never sever our ties to the past that formed us. The teachings of Scripture—the rule and guide of our faith—remain as vital today as they were two thousand years ago. Living in a new day does not mean discarding what has been handed down. Interpreting God’s Word for our time does not require throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

You do not cut yourself off from the past in order to address the future.

A closed mind is dangerous. We must always look in both directions. Therefore, we conserve and liberate at the same time.

Jesus and the Priority of Life

Jesus himself embodied this truth.

He was both conservative and liberal—open to the future without destroying the past. He came not to abolish the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them.

Again and again, he returned to their teachings. They formed the foundation of his preaching—even the Sermon on the Mount. Yet at the same time, he offered something new:

“A new commandment I give you: that you love one another, even as I have loved you.”

“You have heard that it was said of old,” he would say, “but I say to you…”

Jesus conserved and liberated at the same time. He did not destroy the past, but he moved in ways that gave life to others and set them free.

Returning to our text in Matthew, we see Jesus confronted by the Pharisees—people deeply committed to their religious tradition. They were threatened by him. Their interpretation of the law had become rigid, and Jesus introduced a new light that they did not know how to receive. Unable to cope with what he represented, they sought to dismiss and discredit him.

Human beings are capable of destroying one another with tragic efficiency. But it is something else entirely to be so free and at peace within oneself that one can extend freedom and peace to others.

That, too, is something more important.

Listening for the Cry

Speaking recently to parents and members of a graduating class in the Pasadena Independent School District, I asked them to imagine themselves at a rock festival, in a high-school auditorium, or sitting at home watching television. Then I asked them to listen to the words of a song written by Dave Mason and performed by the group Traffic:

Somebody’s cryin’ to be heard
And there’s also someone who hears every word…

The song speaks of distraction, blame, self-absorption, and the painful realization that we often fail to hear one another. It names a longing that crosses generations.

Cryin’ To Be Heard ~ Dave Mason & Traffic

Traffic ℗ 1968 Island Records, a division of Universal Music Operations Limited
Released on: 1968-01-01

The New Commandment

Something more important than blaming others.
Something more important than dividing a church
or a nation into conservatives and liberals.

John 13:34-35 — “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

This is not sentimental love. It is costly, attentive, interruptible love—the kind that leaves hay in the field, cancels appointments, heals on the Sabbath, and listens for the cry beneath the noise.

That is the work to which we are called.

Something More Important
Than Dividing a Church or a Nation into Conservatives and Liberals

—Rev. Robert P. Starbuck, Mdiv., PhD (1927-2013)
Sermon delivered at Asbury United Methodist Church
Pasadena, Texas on August 9, 1970

Editorial Note

The Pharisees referenced in the New Testament were a Jewish movement during the Second Temple period, known for their devotion to Scripture and daily religious practice. After the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, Pharisaic Judaism became the foundation of Rabbinic Judaism. Like Christianity, Judaism has evolved over centuries into diverse expressions and denominations. Understanding these historical distinctions is essential for responsible interpretation of the Gospel texts and for guarding against caricature and antisemitism. The shared moral and spiritual inheritance of Judaism and Christianity reflects the deep maturation of both faiths across two millennia.

Editor’s Note

This sermon was delivered in August of 1970, at a moment already marked by national strain and moral uncertainty. Only weeks earlier, four students had been killed at Kent State University. The country was wrestling with war, protest, generational fracture, and a growing loss of trust in institutions meant to protect life.

I was eighteen years old when my father wrote and delivered this sermon—newly graduated, preparing to leave home and begin college. That personal threshold matters, not because the sermon speaks directly to it, but because it helps explain the tone my father chose. This is not a sermon shaped by ideological certainty or rhetorical heat. It is shaped by attentiveness, restraint, and a refusal to let division have the final word.

Rather than naming enemies or assigning blame, the sermon turns repeatedly to a quieter question: What interrupts us rightly? What claims precedence over schedules, categories, and even deeply held positions when human life and dignity are at stake?

The sermon’s recurring phrase—“something more important”—is not an argument so much as a pause. It echoes the Gospel scene it expounds, in which Jesus heals on the Sabbath not to abolish the law, but to reveal its purpose. In a season when many voices were demanding allegiance to one side or another, this sermon chose to listen instead.

More than fifty years later, its refusal to reduce faith—or civic life—to camps and labels feels not dated, but bracing. It reminds us that moral seriousness is not measured by how fiercely we defend our positions, but by whether we remain interruptible by love, suffering, and the cry to be heard.

That remains something more important.

—Ron Starbuck
Publisher & Executive Editor
Saint Julian Press, Houston, Texas

Saint Julian Press. (2026). Something More Important–Than Dividing a Church or a Nation into Conservatives and Liberals by the Rev. Robert P. Starbuck, Mdiv., PhD, © 2026 Saint Julian Press. January 30, 2026, sermon publication.

If this sermon helps bring clarity to your thoughts and others’, please feel free to share it with a friend or even someone in Congress, as reminder of who we ar4e as Americans, our common humanity, and urgent need to treat one another with dignity.

Scripture as Poetry or Certainty

Saint Julian Press — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 12:24:03 GMT

“Certainty is not a place we arrive. It is a way we learn to walk.” ~ Photographic image of the Val d’Orcia UNESCO World Heritage Site and the Pieve dei Santi Vito e Modesto a Corsignano (Parish Church of Saints Vito and Modesto in Corsignano). ~ In Pienza, Italy.

Scripture as Poetry or Certainty

How Reading Forms the Soul: An Anglican View

The question before people of faith—of any faith or spiritual tradition—is not whether scripture is true, but where certainty comes from.

For many, certainty is imagined as something secured by reading a text in the right way—by fixing meaning, resolving ambiguity, and arriving at correct conclusions. But this has never been how faith, at its deepest and most enduring, has known certainty. The confidence that sustains faith does not arise from interpretive mastery. It arises from an encounter.

Scripture, read as poetry, as literature, and as something more than either, does not grant certainty by closing meaning. It opens the self toward the practices in which certainty is learned—relationship, community, sacrament, contemplation, and the slow schooling of love.

Scripture as Poetry: An Opening, Not a Closure

At its most enduring, holy scripture—from any human faith—is not primarily explanatory. It is formative. Its dominant forms—poetic verse, psalm and parable, hymn and vision, lament and blessing—do not aim to settle arguments. They aim to shape attention.

Poetry resists haste. It refuses the urgency that seeks immediate resolution. In doing so, it creates interior space—the space where conscience awakens, where responsibility takes root, where transformation becomes possible.

Across sacred traditions, this poetic function appears again and again. Psalms speak honestly from fear and trust. Parables resist closure. Sutras loosen the grip of grasping. Qur’anic verses circle truth rather than seize it. Meaning remains alive because the reader is required to remain present.

Scripture read this way does not tell us what to think so much as teach us how to attend—to the words, to one another, and to the movement of the Spirit within lived experience.

Slowness, Attention, and the Work of the Spirit

Scripture is not an inflexible legal document of judgment, unyielding viewpoint, or fixed certainty. It is a pathway—something we walk—leading us into the living mystery of God and creation.

To walk a path requires time. It resists haste. It asks for presence rather than control. Read as poetry, scripture slows the reader down and creates the conditions in which the Holy Spirit can work—not by force or clarity alone, but through patience, receptivity, and trust.

In this slower register, meaning is no longer seized; it is received. Certainty does not arrive as conclusion, but as relationship—formed gradually through attention, return, and practice. What is learned is not merely about God, but with God.

This is also true of liturgy. Like poetry, its language is deliberately spacious—shaped not for efficiency but for offering. It trains the body and the heart in humility and consent. It creates room for God’s love to act within time rather than outside it.

Sacrament and the Language of Offering

In the Anglican tradition, this contemplative slowness is woven directly into sacramental prayer. The Eucharistic language of self-offering does not assert certainty; it yields to it:

And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, our selves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice unto thee… that he may dwell in us, and we in him.

This is not the language of control. It is the language of consent. The self is not asserted but offered—selves, souls, and bodies—not as achievement, but as gift.

Certainty here does not arise from worthiness or correct understanding, but from trust: trust that grace precedes merit, that love pardons before it perfects, that communion is received before it is explained.

The prayer holds us still long enough to remember that faith is not something we perform for God, but something God performs within us. This mutual indwelling—he in us, and we in him—is the ground of Christian certainty. It is relational, sacramental, and lived.

Certainty as Trust, Not Possession

The certainty at the heart of faith does not come from reading scripture in a single, authorized way. It comes from lived participation in love—from relationships that bear weight over time, from sacramental practices that school the body in grace, from contemplative attention that makes room for the Spirit.

Here Anglican sacramentality meets the Quaker witness to the Inner Light. For Friends, silence is not emptiness but availability—a shared attentiveness to the Spirit at work within and among us. Certainty arises not from doctrine enforced, but from faithfulness practiced: waiting together, responding to conscience, recognizing the fruits of love where they appear.

In both traditions, the Holy Spirit is not an abstract idea but an active presence—God’s love moving within the world, shaping persons and communities toward justice, mercy, and repair.

To follow Christ faithfully is not to deny other paths, but to walk one so deeply that it teaches us how to recognize love wherever it is given.

This pattern is not confined to Christianity alone. Across many religious traditions, there are practices that function sacramentally—embodied acts through which the holy is not merely contemplated, but received. These gestures, rituals, and disciplines train the body to recognize what the mind alone cannot secure: that grace is given before it is understood, that love precedes explanation, and that transformation is learned through participation.

Whether enacted through bread and wine, shared silence, prayerful movement, acts of hospitality, or the careful tending of community life, such practices slow us down and place us within a rhythm where the Spirit can work upon us—not abstractly, but concretely, through time, attention, and presence.

Learning Faith Before Explaining It

Long before we were asked to explain scripture, we were invited to live within it.

As a child growing up in the church, scripture was first encountered not as a legal document or a system of proofs, but as story. We heard Bible stories—stories of faith from the Bible—told not to settle questions about history or authority, but to shape imagination and character. The emphasis was not on argument, but on formation: learning what faith looks like when it is lived, trusted, and embodied.

There may have been, quietly in the background, an expectation that these stories were true in a literal sense. But that was not their primary work. Their power lay in how they formed attention, conscience, and hope. They taught us how to recognize mercy, courage, forgiveness, and love—how to see ourselves within a larger story of God’s care for the world. Scripture functioned less as evidence to be defended and more as a companion in becoming.

This was especially true in places like Vacation Bible School, where scripture was not only heard but inhabited. Stories were sung, acted, drawn, and shared. Community was formed around them. Children learned faith not by explanation, but by participation—by belonging, by being welcomed into a shared life shaped by care, joy, and trust. Scripture lived there not as certainty to be enforced, but as a world to enter together.

When Certainty Is Mistaken for Control

There are moments when certainty, separated from relationship and practice, can settle too heavily in interpretation alone. When scripture is approached primarily as a source of stability rather than as an opening toward God and neighbor, its tone and effect can quietly shift.

In such moments, scripture may no longer be experienced primarily as formative of the soul, but as something that helps anchor identity.

Ambiguity becomes difficult to hold. Interpretation carries more weight. The interior life can narrow under the pressure of answers that leave little room for listening. What was meant to guide us into love risks being asked to stand in for it.

This is not a failure of scripture itself. It is an invitation to attend again to posture—to how we stand before the text and before one another.

Scripture, Sacrament, and the Formation of the Soul

Read as literature, as sacred poetry, as the long memory of a people being shaped by God, Scripture becomes more than instruction. It becomes formation. It leads us toward the practices in which trust is learned, and certainty is unlearned as control.

Read alongside sacrament and silence, it teaches us how to wait—how to let love act before we do.

Together, Scripture and liturgy form a people capable of trust without grasping, conviction without coercion, faith without fear.

Certainty, rightly understood, is not something we possess.
It is something we are gathered into.

It is sustained not by speed or precision, but by a willingness to linger where grace is quietly at work. We encounter that grace in words written on the page and inscribed upon the heart. The stories, psalms, and verses we read and pray become instruments of transformation.

The power of God’s Word does not rest in literalism, but in encounter—in how the Word meets us, searches us, reshapes us, and forms us into people capable of love. What we receive inwardly is what we are sent to bear outwardly.

There is a reason we confess Christ as the Incarnate Word.
The Word does not remain text.
The Word becomes flesh.
And what becomes flesh must be lived.

A Closing Word

The question before us is not whether we will read scripture seriously, but how.

Every generation returns to these texts with urgency. We ask them to steady us, to clarify us, to anchor us in a world that moves too quickly and fractures too easily. We long for assurance—for something that will not shift beneath our feet.

But the manner in which we seek that assurance matters. Scripture can become a shelter that opens us, or a structure we fortify. It can train our attention toward love or narrow it toward control. The difference is not in the text itself, but in the posture we bring to it—in whether we approach it as an invitation or as an instrument.

And so the deeper question emerges—not about truth alone, but about formation; not about correctness alone, but about the kind of people we are becoming as we read.

Will we read it as poetry that opens the soul,
or as certainty we imagine we must defend?

Will we seek assurance through control,
or through participation in love?

Faith endures not because every question is answered, but because the Spirit continues to move—within us, between us, and through the ordinary practices where God’s love is made known again and again.

Wisdom lives in verbs, because life does.
And certainty, at its best, lives in trust.

Cappella della Madonna di Vitaleta ~ Val d’Orcia

—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Houston, Texas

Author’s Note

This essay is offered as a companion to Interiority and the Human Inheritance, continuing a reflection on faith as a lived, formative practice shaped by attention, patience, and love.

Saint Julian Press. (2026). Scripture as Poetry or Certainty: How Reading Forms the Soul, © 2026 Saint Julian Press. Revised on February 11, 2026. January 14, 2026, was the original essay publication.

Interiority and the Human Inheritance

Saint Julian Press — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 22:50:10 GMT

Walking Together ~ Wisdom lives in verbs, because life does.

Interiority and the Human Inheritance

Faith, Wisdom, and the Courage to Remain Open

In a time marked by cultural wars, deepening social polarization, fear, conflict, and the renewed rise of nationalism, authoritarian ideologies, and isolationism across the globe, we are pressed to ask questions—not merely as citizens or believers, but as human beings.

This essay begins there. It also remembers a generation who came before us—what Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation—those who lived through World War II and stood, often at great cost, for justice and mercy against the veiled and overt “isms” that scarred the twentieth century and now re-emerge in the twenty-first.

Nearly a century ago, amid the dislocations of modern life after the First World War, the American poet Archibald MacLeish—later the ninth Librarian of Congress—gave voice to a growing unease. In The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928) wrote:

We have learned the answers, all the answers:
It is the question that we do not know.
We are not wise.

MacLeish was not condemning knowledge. He was naming a deeper danger: a culture increasingly confident in its answers, yet estranged from the interior depth where wisdom is formed.

The Axial Discovery: An Interior Space Opens

What MacLeish sensed, the great religious and philosophical traditions had already encountered long before. Between roughly 800 and 200 BCE—a period often called the Axial Age—human beings across cultures began to experience an interior space: a reflective depth in which suffering, responsibility, and transformation could be named, examined, and lived.

This was not a convergence of doctrine. It was a shared discovery of inwardness.

Across Buddhist, Jewish, Greek, and Christian traditions, a striking pattern emerges: release, transformation, and compassionate return. Liberation is no longer found in securing the self or defending inherited order at all costs, but in relinquishing false solidity and re-entering the world with responsibility and care.

This axial grammar does not end in late antiquity. It continues when Islam arises in the seventh century, carrying forward the same inward seriousness through a distinct revelation and poetic form. In the Qur’an’s language of light, in the contemplative practices of Sufism, and in the poetry of its mystics, faith again turns inward before it moves outward—illumination not as possession, but as guidance; devotion not as control, but as surrender shaped by love.

Scripture as Poetry: How Interiority Is Sustained

Holy scripture, at its most enduring, is not primarily explanatory. It is formative—the path we follow in deep spiritual formation.

Across traditions, scripture functions as poetic language that trains attention inward: psalms that speak honestly from fear and trust, parables that resist closure, sutras that loosen the grip of grasping, verses that circle truth rather than seize it.

One image appears again and again: light—not as spectacle, but as interior illumination.

“Your word is a lamp to my feet, and a light to my path.” (Psalms)
“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (Gospel of John)
“Form is emptiness; emptiness is form.” (Heart Sutra)
“God is the Light of the heavens and the earth… light upon light.” (Qur’an 24:35)

These texts do not collapse meaning into certainty. They open a space in which conscience can awaken, and responsibility can take shape.

Ambiguity as Openness, Not Evasion

Ambiguity is often mistaken for ambivalence or indecision, when in fact it names a distinct quality of attention. Ambivalence shrinks responsibility; ambiguity enlarges it.

To live with ambiguity is not to abandon truth, but to acknowledge that truth is deeper than any single interpretation. The axial traditions assume this from the start. Their poetry, parable, and paradox do not signal confusion, but reverence—an insistence that the interior life must remain open if transformation is to occur. It is openness.

Certitude closes that space.
Ambiguity keeps it alive.

This does not mean faith lacks certainty at its center. For Christians, confidence in God, in creation, and in God as love remains foundational—a worldview that encompasses the whole of life and the whole of the world. Precisely because this certainty is so deep, interpretation remains open. Love that claims to save the world cannot be reduced to a single explanation without being diminished.

Memory, Moral Courage, and the Cost of Wisdom

The generation that resisted fascism and authoritarianism in the last century did not do so with slogans alone. They did so with moral seriousness, interior judgment, and a willingness to act without guarantees.

MacLeish’s warning reminds us that civilizations falter not only when they lose belief, but when they lose wisdom—the capacity to remain inwardly attentive when certainty becomes seductive.

The crisis is not loss of belief.
The crisis is loss of wisdom.
And wisdom begins where certainty pauses.

A Faith That Moves

In the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, fidelity and freedom are never opposed. He honors the law and the prophets even as he opens them outward toward those who had been excluded. He does not abolish tradition; he fulfills it by giving it life.

His teaching culminates not in a system, but in a commandment:

“Love one another. Just as I have loved you.”

Here, faith is not possession but movement.

Wisdom lives in verbs, because life does.
And if God is love, then God is not something we hold, but something we are continually being drawn into.

Faith, understood this way, is not the defense of fixed positions. It is participation in an ongoing call—asking again and again how love is to be embodied here, now, and for whom.

Interfaith Dialogue as Axial Recovery

When faith is treated as possession, dialogue becomes a threat. What is held must be defended. Difference becomes danger.

But when faith is understood as participation, dialogue becomes a shared discipline. Not a search for sameness, but a recognition of familiar work being done in different languages.

Across traditions, people of faith know what it means to release what constricts life, to attend inwardly to conscience, and to return to the world with renewed responsibility. These are not abstractions. They are verbs: listening, repenting, forgiving, welcoming, repairing, loving.

The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi gives voice to this interior openness with disarming simplicity:

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”

— Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Masnavi
English rendering after Coleman Barks

Rumi is not abandoning moral truth. He is loosening the grip of rigid judgment so that encounter, transformation, and love can occur. The field he names is the interior space where faith becomes movement rather than possession.

Interfaith dialogue succeeds when it begins here—not with doctrines compared, but with practices recognized. You, too, know what it is to be questioned from within.

This is not the erasure of difference. It is the recovery of depth.

A Closing Word

The question before us is not whether faith will survive our moment, but whether wisdom will remain alive within it. Answers are plentiful. What remains fragile is our capacity to ask the right questions—to stay attentive, to remain open, to risk transformation rather than retreat into certainty.

The task now, as always, is not to close that movement down, but to learn again how to participate in it—patiently, courageously, and together.

—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Houston, Texas

Author’s Note

This essay reflects an ongoing exploration of interiority, faith, and moral responsibility across traditions. It is offered not to resolve disagreement, but to recover the inward disciplines that make wisdom—and compassion—possible in shared human life.

Remembering What We Are Learning to Become

Saint Julian Press — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 12:21:07 GMT

Trinity Episcopal Church ~ Midtown Houston

Remembering What We Are Learning to Become

A Reflection on Life and Living

An old friend reached out to me not long ago. Her mother had died, and she was trying to gather the pieces that follow such a loss: an organist, scriptures to be read, words that might honor a life without explaining it away. Her mother had been formed by the steady faith of the United Methodist and Episcopal traditions—mainstream, generous, grounded Christianity. Nothing dramatic. Nothing showy. A life lived faithfully, and now entrusted back to God.

What she needed was not novelty. She needed language that could bear weight.

Funerals have a way of stripping us down to what actually matters. They remind us that theology is not an abstract exercise. It is something we lean on when we cannot stand on our own. The question in that moment is not what theory explains death, but what words help us tell the truth without losing hope.

This is where scripture, music, and prayer come together—not to solve grief, but to hold it.

The Episcopal Church – The Book of Common Prayer
The Burial of the Dead: Rite One

I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord;
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live;
and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.
I know that my Redeemer liveth,
and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth;
and though this body be destroyed, yet shall I see God;
whom I shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold,
and not as a stranger.
For none of us liveth to himself,
and no man dieth to himself.
For if we live, we live unto the Lord;
and if we die, we die unto the Lord.
Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.

Often, the liturgy and scriptures chosen for such moments are familiar. This is the poetry of faith—the promise that love abides, that nothing can separate us from God, that we see now only in part but will one day see more clearly. These words endure not because they answer every question, but because they tell the truth gently, and tell it in a way we can bear.

1 Corinthians 13:8–12

⁸Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. ⁹For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part, ¹⁰but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. ¹¹When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. ¹²For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.

They remind us that Christian hope has never rested on a detailed map of what comes next. It rests on trust: that the One who knows us fully does not forget us at death.

In moments like these, I find myself returning to a quieter question—one that sits beneath doctrine and beyond argument:

What is it that continues?

Across human history, cultures and faiths have wrestled with this question in different ways. Some have spoken of resurrection, others of rebirth, others of awakening or liberation. The vocabularies differ. The intuition is shared. Human beings have long sensed that life is not disposable, that awareness matters, that love leaves a trace deeper than memory alone.

When these traditions are at their wisest, they do not insist that the self continues unchanged, intact, as it was. Instead, they suggest something subtler and more hopeful:

What endures is spiritual formation—transformational in nature. We are being formed even now, shaped and reshaped in ways both gradual and sudden.

What carries forward is not who we were, but how we were shaped. Not the story we told about ourselves, but the way awareness learned to lean—toward compassion or fear, toward trust or grasping, toward love or withdrawal. It is something we come to recognize as new and renewing.

In this way of seeing, memory is not primarily autobiographical. It is dispositional. It appears as mercy learned, patience practiced, attention given—a way of seeing formed over time.

Christian language has always known how to speak of this, even when it has hesitated to name it directly. We speak of spiritual formation, of union with Christ, of putting on the mind of Christ. These are not mechanical descriptions. They are relational ones, pointing toward a life being reoriented—slowly, or sometimes all at once—toward love.

Here, transformation is not ascent alone—though ascent is present—but humility. Not grasping, but self-giving and reception, the receiving of grace. Awareness is reshaped not by domination, but by love poured out.

Philippians 2:5-11
⁵Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
⁶who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
⁷but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
⁸he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
⁹Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
¹⁰so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
¹¹and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

Paul’s language here, and about knowing and being known, is not a promise of greater information, but of a clearer relationship. It gestures toward a moment when distortion falls away—when we are seen as we truly are, and discover that this seeing is also mercy.

Read this way, judgment itself is transformed. It is no longer imagined primarily as condemnation, but as clarity: the moment when nothing needs to be defended anymore—the moment when love tells the truth and the truth no longer wounds.

Resurrection, too, is freed from anxious literalism. It becomes not the restarting of a body as it was, but the continuation of a life held in God—transformed, not erased. What is raised is not merely what has been, but what has been becoming.

Other traditions gesture toward this same mystery with different images. Science, at its most careful, speaks of consciousness as relational and emergent, shaped through connection rather than contained in isolation. None of these ways of speaking needs to cancel one another out. They occupy different registers, pointing toward a reality larger than any single vocabulary can contain.

They are, as the old saying goes, fingers pointing at the moon. The danger is not in the fingers, but in mistaking them for the light itself.

Pastorally, this matters—especially at a funeral.

What families need in moments of loss is not an argument about what happens after death. They need permission to trust that love has not been wasted. That a life shaped by care, patience, humor, generosity, and faith is not lost to the universe. That God does not discard what God has patiently formed.

When we say, “she is held,” we are not making a technical claim. We are confessing hope. When we say, “we commend her to God,” we are not solving a mystery. We are placing a life where we trust it belongs.

This is language that can be shared and preached without confusion. It does not require people to agree on metaphysics. It asks only that they recognize what they already know in their bones: that love matters, that awareness grows, that nothing formed in love is erased.

In the end, the most honest thing we can say—at a funeral, in a sermon, or in quiet conversation—is this: we are still learning how to speak about what we are becoming. Our words are provisional. Our hope is not.

We entrust our dead to God not because we understand everything that follows, but because we trust the One who has known them all along. And in that trust, we continue the work of formation ourselves—learning, slowly and imperfectly, how to live toward the same love that now holds them.

That, too, is part of what continues.

1 Corinthians 15:51-52
⁵¹Look, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, ⁵²in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.

—Ron Starbuck

Clear Sight in a Time of Hardening

Saint Julian Press — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 10:59:46 GMT

Seeing Clearly Beyond the Horizon

Clear Sight in a Time of Hardening

Seeing Clearly Beyond the Horizon

Grace at Work in a Time of Moral Exhaustion

Most of us did not intend to grow less patient or less able to see one another clearly. And yet, if we are honest, many of us sense a shift. Words feel sharper than they once did. Judgments form more quickly, often before understanding has time to arrive. What once startled us can begin to feel familiar, even practical. Rarely does this show up as open malice. More often, it comes to us sounding reasonable, even unavoidable.

This matters.

Because when what unsettles us becomes ordinary, our vision slowly changes. We begin to notice labels before faces, conclusions before stories, positions before people. The loss is not only moral; it is spiritual as well. Something essential in us grows harder to remember. We forget what judgment is meant to serve.

There comes a time
when cruelty no longer shocks us—
not because it is right,
but because it is everywhere.
This is the danger.

The danger is not that we suddenly become cruel people. It is that we become accustomed. We adjust. We explain. We tell ourselves this is how the world works now. There is a strange relief in that explanation. It releases us from the strain of resistance.

But relief is not the same as wisdom.

When resistance fades, imagination follows. And when imagination thins, agency falters. Decisions become easier, faster, harsher—not because we intend harm, but because we no longer feel the full weight of what is at stake.

We may say:
This is just how things are now.
And we may feel relief
at no longer struggling.
Let us not confuse that relief
with truth.

At such moments, the question is no longer how to be right, but how to remain human. This is where a deeper word must be spoken—not as reassurance, but as ground, not as an excuse, but as a beginning.

There is nothing we can do
to justify ourselves
for the ways we have grown numb.
There is nothing we can say
to undo the moments
we turned away.
And yet—
we are accepted,
held by something
greater than we can name.

Acceptance—grace, once we learn to receive it—does not release us from responsibility. It draws us back into it. When we are no longer occupied with defending ourselves, our vision widens. We begin to see the Divine Spirit at work—in and with and through us.

Acceptance does not end judgment.
It gives judgment its depth.

We are accepted
before we learn how
to be kind again.
We are accepted
so that we may learn.

One of the quiet confusions of our time is the belief that kindness softens judgment. In fact, judgment without moral imagination hardens into cruelty without noticing its own turn. It confuses certainty with courage, speed with truth, and forgets—almost entirely—what justice is meant to serve.

Kindness, in this deeper sense, is not sentiment. It is clear sight under pressure. It is the practiced refusal to reduce another human being to a single sentence, a loud belief, or a recent failure.

Kindness is not
the refusal to judge.
It is the refusal
to annihilate.

There is another danger at work here—quieter, but no less corrosive. It does not depend on force. It works slowly, by accumulation.

When public life is saturated with inaccuracies and distortions—with half-truths, reversals, and carefully sustained confusions—the deepest harm is not that every falsehood is believed. It is that confidence in truth itself begins to erode. Gradually, the distinction between what is true and what is not grows uncertain, not because we cease to care, but because we no longer know where to place our weight.

This kind of confusion is wearying. Over time, it drains our moral energy. We find ourselves asking less often what is right and more often what is safest to say. Language loses its steadiness. Perception dulls. And the shared ground on which judgment depends begins, quietly, to slip away.

When truth is obscured
not once,
but repeatedly,
the danger is not deception.
It is exhaustion.

In such a climate, cruelty gains ground not only through hatred, but through fatigue. When everything feels questionable, we cling to whatever offers certainty. When language no longer points reliably to reality, force begins to substitute for meaning.

This does not require villains everywhere. It happens when the shared world—the common ground where truth can be tested and named—begins to dissolve. When that happens, conscience is not silenced; it is disoriented.

When the ground shifts too often,
we stop asking
where we are standing.

This is why thoughtfulness matters so deeply now. Not cleverness. Not volume. Thoughtfulness—the patient work of re-orienting perception, until right and wrong can be felt again, not as slogans to be repeated, but as distinctions lived and borne in the body.

Kindness plays an unexpected role here. It steadies the field. It slows the moment just enough for discernment to return. It reminds us that truth is not only something to be defended, but something that must be inhabited.

Finding words for this—giving shape to what resists simplification—is the quiet labor every poet and writer knows. It is the work of listening long enough for meaning to surface, and of speaking carefully enough not to fracture what is already fragile.

Before truth can be defended,
it must be seen.
Before it can be spoken,
it must be trusted again.

There is, beneath our arguments and our fear, a wider ground. Not a place where truth is abandoned, but where it is re-rooted. When we no longer need to be justified at every moment, the field widens. The future loosens. Possibility returns.

When we stop needing
to be right,
the other becomes visible again.
This is not peace.
It is possibility.

A quiet scriptural echo may help here—not as command, but as orientation: the truth will make us free. Not because truth is easy, but because without it we lose the ground beneath our feet. Freedom, in this sense, is not the absence of limits. It is the recovery of clear sight.

Acceptance does not lead to passivity, but to action—action released from the need to dominate or prevail. We are accepted into responsibility, into care, into the long work of remaining human in a world that often rewards hardness. This is grace at work among us, made visible as graciousness within the life we share.

We are accepted
not so that nothing matters,
but so that everything does.

We do not heal the world by perfecting our arguments. We heal it by refusing to become what we oppose. Clearer sight will not come through victory, but through kindness strong enough to keep the human face in view.

Let us not ask
how to save the world.
Let us ask how to remain human
when the world forgets
why that matters.
We are accepted
in this question.
And because we are accepted,
we may begin—
again—
to see.

—Ron Starbuck

In the Bleak Midwinter

Saint Julian Press — Thu, 25 Dec 2025 12:58:29 GMT

In the Bleak Midwinter

Listening for a Truer Christmas

Sometimes the world seems to draw inward, like frozen ground waiting for light. Words come more slowly. Hearts feel guarded. We sense the cold not only in the air, but in the ways we move past one another. At such moments, the season we inhabit is shaped less by weather than by tone—a hesitancy that asks kindness to be chosen more deliberately. In the Bleak Midwinter was written for such times. It does not deny the cold or hurry us toward cheer. It enters quietly, carrying a faith shaped by humility, patience, and attention, and stays with us where we are.

The poem was written in 1872 by Christina Rossetti, whose faith was marked by attentiveness rather than display. She did not write to ornament belief or soften its edges, but to sit with it—to let it be tested by quiet, by restraint, by humility. What she offers here is not a Christmas pageant, but a meditation: a willingness to linger with the poverty of the manger, resisting the impulse to hurry toward easier consolations.

The opening lines do not announce joy; they describe conditions:

In the bleak midwinter,
frosty wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone…

This is not Bethlehem rendered for admiration or escape. It is Bethlehem received as human experience—the places where life feels paused, where hope comes slowly, where the ground offers little give. Rossetti is willing to begin there, without adornment. And perhaps that is why the poem continues to find its way to us.

From that honesty, she turns—gently, almost without announcement—toward the mystery at the heart of Christian faith:

Our God, heaven cannot hold Him,
nor earth sustain…
In the bleak midwinter
a stable place sufficed
the Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

This is a teaching many of us first encountered long ago, and yet one we return to again and again: God does not come by force or certainty, nor through the assurances of cultural strength. God comes by consent—through vulnerability—through a child whose first shelter is borrowed, whose first companions are animals and the poor.

This is not a Christ shaped by slogans or defended by walls. It is a Christ who remains unadorned, who teaches simply by being present, who enters the world without waiting for it to be made ready.

Rossetti pauses with the ordinariness of that arrival, letting it remain gentle and sufficient:

Enough for Him…
a breastful of milk
and a mangerful of hay…

Enough. The word lingers. It does not argue or persuade; it simply rests where it is placed. Enough is not excess or accumulation, but sufficiency—the grace of what is already given. In Rossetti’s telling, holiness does not depend on grandeur or display. It asks only for attention.

From there, the poem turns in an almost imperceptible human way, setting aside angels and theology alike:

But His mother only,
in her maiden bliss,
worshipped the Beloved
with a kiss.

No argument. No defense. Just love offered where it is possible.

The final stanza does what the best religious poetry always does—it turns the question back toward us, without accusation:

What can I give Him,
poor as I am?

Not what should I believe, or whom should I oppose, or how can I be right. But: what can I give?

And Rossetti answers with disarming simplicity:

Yet what I can I give Him—
give my heart.

In a time when religion is so often asked to carry fear, division, or certainty, this poem offers a quieter way of being faithful. It does not urge us to conquer or persuade, but to remain attentive—to one another, to our own hearts, to the small acts of mercy already within reach. It invites us to soften where we have grown guarded, to offer what we can, not as sentiment, but as a way of living.

Perhaps this is why In the Bleak Midwinter continues to endure. It does not promise escape from the cold, or a world suddenly made warm. It offers companionship within it. It reminds us that the teachings of Christ begin not with power, but with nearness—and that compassion, quietly practiced, is enough.

In the Bleak Midwinter

By Christina Rossetti (1872)
The Harold Darke Coral Anthem

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

In the bleak midwinter,
frosty wind made moan,
earth stood hard as iron,
water like a stone;
snow had fallen, snow on snow,
snow on snow,
in the bleak midwinter,
long ago.

Our God, heaven cannot hold Him,
nor earth sustain;
heaven and earth shall flee away
when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter
a stable place sufficed
the Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim
worship night and day,
a breastful of milk
and a mangerful of hay;
enough for Him, whom angels
fall down before,
the ox and ass and camel
which adore.

Angels and archangels
may have gathered there,
cherubim and seraphim
thronged the air;
but His mother only,
in her maiden bliss,
worshipped the Beloved
with a kiss.

What can I give Him,
poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb;
if I were a wise man,
I would do my part;
yet what I can I give Him—
give my heart.

This is a YouTube - King’s College, Cambridge presentation of Darke’s arrangement from 2021.

In the bleak midwinter (Darke) | King’s College Cambridge

℗ King's College Recordings 2021

Apple Music

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Merry Christmas

—Ron Starbuck

Where Mercy Meets the Wound

Saint Julian Press — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 17:20:11 GMT

Morrow Chapel - Trinity Episcopal Church - Midtown Houston

Where Mercy Meets the Wound

A Meditation on Love, Israel, Palestine, and the Burden of Conscience

“Justice, justice you shall pursue.” — Deuteronomy 16:20

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” — Julian of Norwich

Editor’s Note (April 2026)

This essay, first written in late 2025, has been lightly updated to reflect the widening scope of conflict in the region. Its central reflections remain unchanged: a meditation on conscience, compassion, and the moral tensions that persist where war and humanity meet.

There are moments in history when the human heart feels split in two—when faith itself must walk through fire. We are living through such a moment now, as the war between Israel and Hamas has widened into a more perilous regional conflict—drawing in neighboring forces and global powers, including the shadow of Iran and its proxies, and extending violence into places like Lebanon, where long-standing tensions are now approaching open war.

Two thoughts have carried me through these months of watching and weeping.

The first is how twentieth-century theologians—from Barth and Tillich to Moltmann, Rahner, and Nouwen—turned the gaze of Christianity toward a God of compassion, not condemnation. They found God not in triumph, but in the wounded places of the world. They taught us that divine love is not a distant decree but an act of shared suffering—God’s presence in the heartbreak of creation.

The second is how, in the years immediately following the Second World War, Christians across many traditions began to confront their long estrangement from the Jewish people. Protestant theologians such as Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr, along with the newly formed World Council of Churches, called for repentance and reconciliation—naming antisemitism a sin against both God and humanity.

The Seelisberg Conference of 1947, where Jewish and Christian thinkers together drafted the Ten Points of Seelisberg, urged believers to reject the “teaching of contempt” and to honor the enduring covenant between God and Israel. These early ecumenical efforts helped reopen the Church's moral imagination.

Nearly two decades later, the Catholic declaration Nostra Aetate (1965) would give that awakening a universal voice—affirming that God’s covenant with Israel had never been revoked and condemning all forms of religious hatred. Together, these movements formed a quiet revolution: a renewal of kinship between those who pray to the same God of Abraham. It was, in its way, a second Reformation—not of doctrine, but of conscience.

At first, I thought these two stories—one about divine love, the other about reconciliation—were separate. Now I see that they are the same river, flowing from a single spiritual source. Both are born of a turning—a recognition that love and reconciliation are not frail emotions but the strongest truths we have left after the devastations of the modern age.

To believe in God today is to believe that compassion has weight—not as sentiment, but as being itself. And that God’s mercy, flowing through the three great Abrahamic faiths, still seeks to reconcile what history has divided—calling us to remember that the heart of God is larger than the boundaries of belief.

The Wound of Two Peoples

This conviction is being tested in the hardest way imaginable. The war has left both peoples bleeding. No one emerges untouched.

Among my Jewish friends, there is heartbreak, but also division. Some defend Israel’s right to survive in a world that has too often sought its annihilation. Others grieve for the devastation, fearing what the war is doing to the moral and spiritual soul of Israel itself. Judaism has always carried this inner dialogue—between justice and mercy, survival and conscience—a wrestling with God that is profoundly Jewish, and profoundly human.

And yet, in the shadow of this suffering, another darkness has returned. Antisemitism, thought defeated, has risen again in our streets and on our screens—sometimes disguised as moral outrage, sometimes unashamed. Once more, the ancient hatred that fueled the Shoah has found a voice, confusing the acts of a government with the worth of a people.

“Never Again”—those two words were meant as a vow, born of memory and loss. A vow that humanity would not again allow the degradation or destruction of a people to unfold unchecked.

And yet here we stand, held within a tension that resists resolution—between that vow and the realities of war, between the survival of Israel as a nation and the suffering of those who share the same sun and soil.

The Drift Toward Conscience—or Conquest

Within Israel, a powerful bloc of far-right leaders has pushed the nation toward a perilous course—one defined at times more by control than by covenant. Settlement expansion, annexation pressures, and religious zeal risk displacing the prophetic call to justice and restraint.

There are, too, voices shaped by fear or conviction that leave little room for the stranger or the neighbor. They do not speak for Israel as a whole; they are not its entirety. And yet, they carry influence—and with it, the risk of narrowing the moral imagination of a people long shaped by its breadth.

Faith too tightly fused with nationalism becomes brittle. A covenant meant as a blessing can harden into exclusion. True strength lies not in dominion but in restraint, not in vengeance but in vision—the vision that justice and mercy must walk together, even when the path between them is unclear.

Such a path not only endangers others; it risks wounding the very soul it seeks to defend.

It is not a new concern. There are voices within the Jewish tradition itself that have long warned of this danger. Martin Buber, writing in the years surrounding the founding of the State of Israel, spoke of the need for a society grounded not only in survival, but in relationship—in what he called the I–Thou, a way of being that recognizes the full humanity of the other, even across division and fear.

Buber feared that a state born out of necessity and justified by history could, under the weight of that same history, begin to harden—turning inward, defining itself over and against its neighbors, and in doing so, risk losing the very moral vision it was meant to embody. His concern was not abstract. It was rooted in the knowledge that fear, especially when justified by real threat, can narrow the soul of a people.

That fear is not imagined. It is lived. It is carried in memory, in history, in the knowledge of how often the world has turned away. And yet, even here, the question remains: how to defend life without diminishing the humanity beyond one’s borders; how to remain a people shaped by covenant, and not solely by survival.

The Role of Conscience—and the Work of Peace

The United States cannot dictate Israel’s future, but it can shape the horizon in which choices are made. It still holds moral and diplomatic leverage. It can insist that aid be tied to restraint, that security be joined to dignity, and that peace—not punishment—remain the long measure of success.

Pragmatism, in this moment, is not cynicism. It is compassion disciplined into policy.

Regional partnerships, conditional support, humanitarian corridors—these are not signs of weakness but of moral seriousness. They acknowledge that peace is rarely pure, but must be built within imperfection, sustained by persistence.

Both Israel and America are being called to remember something older than policy: that a covenant is not a contract of convenience, but a promise of faithfulness. And faithfulness requires seeing the human face—even when it is hardest to do so.

Bearing the Unbearable

So we return to an unanswerable question: How can a people who have suffered so deeply find themselves within a cycle that inflicts such sorrow upon another—upon one another, upon each other?

And yet another tension remains—an existential one. Hamas does not seek peace; it thrives on perpetual war and on the suffering of its own people, using Gaza as both weapon and wound. It denies Israel’s right to exist and, in doing so, denies the hope of peace for Palestinians themselves. Hamas is politically distinct from the Palestinian people.

But the conflict no longer rests solely in Gaza. It has widened—shaped by regional forces, by proxy wars, by ambitions that extend beyond borders. Violence now moves through multiple fronts, drawing civilians ever more deeply into its wake.

Part of the difficulty is this: that a nation has the obligation to defend its people, to protect life against those who would destroy it—and that this defense may unfold in circumstances where the lines between combatant and civilian are deliberately obscured, where violence is carried out from within the spaces where ordinary life is lived.

How one responds in such a moment—how one acts morally while bearing that responsibility—is not a question with easy answers. It is part of the same unbearable tension this reflection cannot resolve.

And within that tension, another question lingers, more difficult still: not only what must be done, but how far it may go—when the necessary begins to press against the merciful, and whether that boundary can be seen clearly in the midst of war. This, too, remains unresolved.

Among the people of Gaza are many who yearn for another way—mothers and fathers who want safety and dignity for their children, who dream not of conquest but of coexistence, who might one day live as neighbors if given the chance. We know this is possible. We have seen such moments before—only to watch them fade beneath the weight of violence.

Perhaps fragile regional efforts toward peace may yet create space for such hope again—for Israel, for Palestinians, and for their neighbors to imagine something beyond survival alone.

And still, Israel must defend its homes, its homeland, and its right to exist—with a strength that does not abandon mercy, with a vigilance that does not forget the humanity beyond its borders.

There is no tidy answer—only the discipline of attention. The trauma of centuries can harden the heart. Fear can take the shape of necessity. But the prophets still whisper across the ruins: Choose life.

Before you know what kindness really is,
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, Kindness

To love Israel or to mourn Gaza must never become a license for hate. To be human is to hold both griefs at once—to cry for the hostages and for the children buried in dust—to remain present where the tension is most difficult to bear.

If compassion truly bears weight, then even now—even here—the covenant endures. Not as resolution, but as responsibility.

A Question for the Heart

As this long night continues, one question remains—quiet, insistent, and unresolved:

Across the Abrahamic faiths, how might the deep visions of compassion and reconciliation—Christian, Jewish, and Islamic alike—speak to one another in a time of fear, grief, and longing for peace?

Perhaps the answer lies not in doctrine, but in shared witness—in refusing to turn away from one another, even when understanding feels distant.

Benediction

May the God who gathers all exiles of the heart gather us now—
into a mercy wide enough to hold our fears,
into a hope strong enough to bear our grief,
into a love deep enough to remain present to what is broken.

And may compassion—
ancient as the prophets,
new as this moment—
guide our steps toward the peace
for which every child of Abraham still longs.

—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Houston, Texas

✨ New Voices for an Old Covenant

Writers of our age wrestling with faith, compassion, and conscience

Naomi Shihab Nye — Words Under the Words

Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, Nye writes from the borderlands of identity — where loss and love are inseparable. Her poetry transforms sorrow into compassion, reminding us that tenderness is a form of strength. Her voice is a bridge between worlds: Arab and Western, Muslim and Christian, exile and home. Through her words, we glimpse how empathy becomes covenant — how to love in a world divided by memory.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks — The Dignity of Difference

Sacks argues that God’s image is reflected not in sameness but in diversity — that the divine covenant calls us to honor difference without fear. His vision of faith as moral responsibility offers a map for living together in a fractured world.

Martin Buber — I and Thou

Buber’s vision of human life is grounded in relationship — what he called the I–Thou, an encounter in which the other is not object but presence, not “it” but “thou.” Writing in the shadow of upheaval and in the early years of the modern Jewish return to the land, Buber warned that even necessary forms of power can harden into distance, and that a people shaped only by survival risks losing the deeper truth of its calling. His work remains a quiet but enduring reminder that the moral life begins in seeing the other as fully human, even—and especially—in times of fear.

David Hartman — A Living Covenant

Hartman reimagined covenant as a living dialogue — dynamic, questioning, and grounded in moral accountability. For him, faith thrives not in obedience alone but in honest relationship.

Yossi Klein Halevi — Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor

Writing to an imagined Palestinian reader from Jerusalem, Halevi searches for a language of empathy in a time of mistrust. His witness reminds us that seeing the other is the first act of peace.

Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg — The Murmuring Deep

Zornberg weaves psychoanalysis, midrash, and literary imagination into a luminous reading of Torah. She draws readers into the interior landscapes of biblical souls — their longing, fear, and courage.

Rowan Williams — Being Human

Williams explores what it means to bear God’s image in a world that often forgets it — reminding us that holiness lies not in separation but in relationship.

Catherine Keller — On the Mystery

Keller’s theology arises from the “process” tradition: God as creative relationship unfolding through time. Compassion and imagination are sacred forces shaping the universe itself.

Christian Wiman — My Bright Abyss

A poet facing mortality, Wiman turns suffering into revelation — discovering God not as an idea but as a presence encountered through the fragility of love.

Marilynne Robinson — Gilead

Set in the American Midwest, Gilead unfolds as a letter from an aging pastor to his young son. Robinson’s prose turns ordinary life into sacrament — showing that faith endures not in argument, but in kindness remembered and renewed.

Together, these writers remind us that covenant and compassion are not relics of the past but living tasks — renewed in every generation that chooses mercy over fear.

Poetic Theology

Saint Julian Press — Wed, 12 Nov 2025 12:02:57 GMT

Chiesa di San Francesco a Pienza - Pienza, Italy

Poetic Theology

The Still Point and the Courage to Be

after Julian of Norwich and Paul Tillich
A reflection by Ron Starbuck — Poet and Publisher, Saint Julian Press, Inc.

“Love was His meaning.”
— Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love
“You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you…”
— Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations

These words began as a conversation — between mystics and moderns, between silence and song. They ask what it means, in our time, to believe that God is Love — and to trust that such love still moves, quietly and steadfastly, through the heart of creation.

There are seasons when theology must come down from its lectern and sit quietly beside us — when words about God must become words with God.

The last century, with all its upheaval and sorrow, taught us that lesson again. Out of two world wars, exile, the holocaust, and the cries of the suffering, a truth as old as faith itself rose: God is Love.

And now, in the twenty-first century, we feel that same lesson stirring once more. The world trembles beneath new uncertainties — conflict and displacement, fear and division, the return of nationalistic ambitions, hunger and famine, religious intolerance, and a growing loss of trust in our shared humanity. The same existential crisis that haunted poets and theologians of the last century resurfaces in new forms, not only within our own borders, but across the globe.

Yet the answer remains what it has always been: love — not as sentiment, not as slogan, but as the living pulse at the heart of all creation. Love as movement, as mercy, as mystery. Love as the one force that heals, redeems, and holds us together when everything else falls apart.

Karl Barth said that love is God’s very being in motion. Paul Tillich called it the force that holds all things together, “the drive toward the unity of the separated.” Jürgen Moltmann showed us that God’s love suffers with the world, refusing to stand apart from our pain.

In every one of these voices, I hear a simple echo of Julian of Norwich, writing from her small cell six centuries earlier: “Love was His meaning.”

At the Still Point

When I began working on At the Still Point: In Conversation with Saint Julian, I wanted to listen to that same steady heartbeat — to find where silence and presence meet.

Julian lived through plague and loss, yet she saw only love at the center of all things. Her faith was not naïve; it was luminous. It saw through despair to something deeper, something whole.

At that still point, the whole world turns — the stars, the soul, the breath. Everything moves, yet there is a peace underneath the motion.

Julian’s “all shall be well” was not a denial of pain; it was a confession of trust — a way of saying that love endures even when we do not understand it. Love is both the stillness and the turning. It is the beginning and the return.

You Are Accepted

Following Julian — not years later, but in the next breath — when I began writing You Are Accepted: In Conversation with Paul Tillich, my simple intention was to continue exploring this same mystery, as another meditation on the modern world’s longing for grace.

Tillich’s words — “You are accepted” — speak to the heart that feels unworthy, uncertain, or afraid. They remind us that we are held by something larger than our own courage, something we did not earn and cannot lose.

Grace is what happens when we stop running from love and allow it to find us. God’s grace is more than finding forgiveness; God’s grace is acceptance through God’s love. It is — grace as God’s forgiveness, grace as God’s presence.

These two books — At the Still Point and You Are Accepted — are like two stained glass windows in the same chapel: Julian’s light streaming through the medieval glass of mysticism, Tillich’s light shining through the modern soul. Both reveal the same radiance. Both teach us that divine love is not a doctrine to be mastered but a presence to be met, again and again, in every human heart.

Poetic Theology — Word, Mystery, and Presence

Poetic theology begins here — at the meeting place of word and wonder.

It is not about explaining God; it is about listening for God. It is about trusting that a poem, a story, or a single line of prayer can open the heart more deeply than any argument ever could.

Theologian David Tracy once called this “the analogical imagination.” Still, I think of it more simply as holy conversation — when language bends toward the sacred, when words begin to shimmer with meaning.

Poetry and theology meet in that space. One listens, the other answers. One dreams, the other awakens. Together, they teach us to see.

Theologia Poetica and Theopoetics — The Ancient and the New

Long before we referred to it as poetic theology, our ancestors called it Theologia Poetica — “theology through poetry.”

Dante understood it when he wrote The Divine Comedy, ascending through beauty to love. Marsilio Ficino and Giambattista Vico saw it, too: that imagination itself could be a doorway to the divine.

They believed that poetry was not decoration but revelation — that metaphor and image reveal truths the mind alone cannot grasp. The Holy Bible is both a holy book of poetry and a sacred book of scripture.

That same insight, reborn in our time, is what we now call Theopoetics: a way of doing theology through story, symbol, and lived experience. It reminds us that faith is not a formula; it is an art form.

When I write, I am not trying to define God. I am trying to recognize God — in the language of love, in the silence between lines, in the courage it takes to keep believing that grace can find us still.

That is what poetic theology does. It turns our words into prayers, and our prayers into acts of creation.

T. S. Eliot and the Birth of Theopoetics

When I think about poetic theology and theopoetics, I often return to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets — a work many now regard as one of the great modern examples of theology expressed through poetry.

Writers and scholars such as Ron Dart and Dwight Longenecker have described Four Quartets as a poetic embodiment of faith’s wisdom journey — a movement through time, silence, and suffering toward the still point of divine love.

They may use different languages, but they are all naming what we now call theopoetics — the way theology takes flesh in art, image, and rhythm rather than in argument.

Eliot’s verses do not explain God; they let us experience God through the cadence of longing and illumination. The “still point of the turning world” becomes an image of divine presence — the same sacred center Julian of Norwich and Paul Tillich sought in their own ways.

In that sense, Four Quartets stands beside the mystical writings of Julian and the modern meditations of Tillich as a touchstone of poetic theology — a bridge between silence and song, between philosophy and prayer.

It reminds us that sometimes the truest theology is written not in prose, but in the rhythm of reverence.

Love as the Grammar of Creation

Poetic theology is the bridge where Julian’s vision and Tillich’s thought meet — the place where mystery becomes near.

It tells us that new revelations continue, never finished; the divine word is being spoken still in every act of compassion, in every breath of beauty.

To write or read in this way is to practice faith itself: not as certainty, but as a way of seeing the world as sacred.

And so I have come to believe that love is the language of creation — the grammar of being. It is noun and verb, essence and action, stillness and song.

The work of poetry, like the work of theology, is to listen for that love and give it voice.

The Spirit of Compassion

In turning toward God as Love and Loving, we have also begun to awaken to God as Consciousness and Compassion in action — the Holy Spirit at work within the living world.

If the last century revealed God as Love, this one is revealing God as Presence — the Spirit that breathes through every act of awareness, mercy, and creativity. We are beginning to understand that divine consciousness is not confined to the heavens but alive in the very heartbeat of creation.

The Spirit moves through us as empathy, as imagination, as the impulse to heal and reconcile. It is compassion not as sentiment but as energy — the divine will to restore wholeness wherever life is broken.

In interfaith dialogue, this awareness is opening new doors. Christians speak of the Holy Spirit, Buddhists of the awakened heart-mind, Hindus of the indwelling Atman, and Muslims of the breath of the Merciful — all pointing toward the same mystery of divine presence that animates and unites all living things.

This is not a dilution of faith but its deepening — a widening of the circle that allows us to see God not only as transcendent but also as intimate, not only as Creator but as the consciousness of compassion itself.

The Spirit is the breath between us. The life in our longing. The quiet reminder that love, when lived, becomes awareness — and awareness, when awakened, becomes love.

Benediction

May the still point of creation
hold us when the world spins too fast.
May the courage to be and love arise in us
with the dawn’s light when faith feels far away.
And may love — patient, radiant, eternal —
move through every word we speak,
until all that remains
is the quiet pulse of grace.

May we rest in that light,
as the Friends once did when America was new —
waiting upon the Spirit,
and listening for the silence that still speaks.

Cover Image: Chiesa di San Francesco a Pienza
Photo by Ron Starbuck, Pienza, Italy

The Spirit that Reconciles

Saint Julian Press — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 11:42:18 GMT

Preface

In every age, the Spirit seeks new ways to reconcile what has been divided—across churches, cultures, and even within the human heart. This reflection explores how that same Spirit continues to move today: through worship and sacrament, through dialogue and silence, through the healing grace of meditation and medicine alike. It is a meditation on unity, compassion, and the living Word who still becomes flesh in every act of love.

Live Oak Friends Meeting - Houston Heights

The Spirit that Reconciles

A Reflection on Dialogue, Difference, and the Living Word
By Ron Starbuck

For many Christians orthodox belief is not a wall but a window. It opens toward mystery. It breathes. It welcomes light.

Across the centuries, the Church has wrestled with the mystery of God. In Justinian’s time, the mystery was how divine and human life met in Christ. The councils of the fifth and sixth centuries sought words to express what the heart already knew—that God had entered the human story without ceasing to be God, and that humanity was taken up into divinity without being consumed. Yet even that miracle of grace became the cause of division, as language, culture, and empire shaped how the mystery was told.

Fifteen centuries later, we find ourselves wrestling again, though in a different key. The question is no longer how God became human, but how God continues to dwell among humankind. The fault lines have shifted, yet the anxiety remains familiar: Who holds the truth? Who guards the faith? Evangelical Christians, mainline Protestants, Roman Catholics, and Orthodox believers each speak from deep wells of conviction. Yet too often those convictions harden into boundaries, and boundaries become walls.

And still—the same Spirit moves among us.

A Lesson from the Past

Just as the ancient division between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian Christians has, in our time, been seen in a new light—no longer a war of orthodoxy and heresy, but a misunderstanding of language and emphasis—so too might our contemporary divisions one day be revealed as a smaller circle within a larger embrace. The old reconciliation teaches us this: that when love listens deeply, truth begins to harmonize.

The Chalcedonians spoke of Christ in two natures, divine and human, without confusion. The Miaphysites spoke of Christ in one nature, united in love. One guarded distinction; the other guarded unity. Both, in their way, defended mystery. So too today, every tradition bears a facet of that same mystery. Both are true; as two things can be true in a complex world.

The Spirit in Many Tongues

To the Evangelical, the Spirit speaks in the intimacy of encounter—Christ alive in the human heart.

For many Evangelicals, faith begins with a moment of personal confession and acceptance—an awakening of the soul that declares, “Jesus is Lord.” Salvation is understood as a conscious turning, a decision of trust made freely and fully. This emphasis on personal conversion and public testimony flows from a desire to experience the immediacy of grace without mediation.

In contrast, other traditions—Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican—see the journey of faith as unfolding within the life of the Church from the very beginning. Baptism, often in infancy, marks entrance into the Body of Christ; confirmation, years later, becomes a conscious affirmation of that baptismal grace. Both paths—conversion and sacrament—are expressions of the same mystery: God’s initiative of love calling the human heart to respond. One stresses awakening; the other continuity. Both are held by the same Spirit who moves before belief and beyond it.

To the Mainline Protestant, the Spirit reveals Christ’s compassion as justice made visible in the world.

To the Roman Catholic, the Spirit breathes through the sacraments, in bread and wine, flesh and word.

To the Orthodox, the Spirit shines as uncreated light, illuminating beauty and transcendence.

And to the Anglican and Episcopal tradition, the Spirit moves along the middle path—the via media—a way grounded in both Word and Sacrament, where the mystery of faith is nourished by beauty, reason, and prayer.

Here, the Spirit draws from the wells of both Reformation and Catholic memory, holding together the contemplative heart and the incarnational life, uniting the altar and the world.

For Anglicans and Episcopalians, as well as other traditional sacramental Christians, the sacraments are not an escape but an embodiment—the Spirit’s quiet insistence that divine grace still takes flesh in bread and wine, in community, in creation, and in the rhythm of daily prayer.

And there are others who live this mystery with luminous simplicity. The Quakers, or Friends, who gather in silence, trust that the Inner Light is the living presence of Christ within every soul. Their worship, without priest or ritual, is itself a sacrament of attentiveness. In their stillness, the Spirit speaks through all equally, reminding the Church that divine revelation is never finished, and that listening itself is a form of prayer. Their testimony—of peace, equality, and simplicity—has long been a quiet echo of the same Incarnate Word, made known in conscience and compassion.

“Perhaps this is the true work of theology in our time: to recognize Christ in unfamiliar garments, to listen for the same music played in other modes.”

The Contemplative Horizon

This same Spirit moves, too, within the contemplative communities that have become a quiet bridge between traditions. In the World Community for Christian Meditation, founded by Fr. John Main and continued by Fr. Laurence Freeman, Christians and seekers of every background sit together in silence—discovering that the language of the heart often runs deeper than the arguments of the mind. In that silence, differences begin to soften, and the presence of Christ is known not through dogma but through stillness, breath, and love.

Paul Knitter’s interfaith work offers another path of insight. His dialogue with Buddhist teachers has revealed how the experience of emptiness (śūnyatā) can meet the Christian vision of divine indwelling. Both, in their own way, speak of self-emptying love—what Christians call kenosis. To Knitter, this is not a contradiction but a complement: a deep resonance between faiths that testifies to the universality of the Spirit’s movement in all who seek truth.

Increasingly, even the medical and psychological sciences have come to recognize the healing power of silence, breath, and meditation. Hospitals, universities, and clinics are now integrating contemplative practices—such as mindfulness, centering prayer, and meditative breathing—into programs for mental health, trauma recovery, and physical healing. What the ancients called the peace of God, which passes understanding, is now measured in slower heart rates, calmer minds, and renewed immune response. Science names it “neuroplasticity” and “parasympathetic response,” yet beneath those terms, many still sense the same sacred pulse: the Spirit at work in the mystery of healing, restoring both body and soul.

The Larger Mystery

As Freeman has written, the Spirit of Christ is not confined within Christianity but flows through all that is true, good, and beautiful. The contemplative mind sees this not as a threat to faith but as its fulfillment—an awakening to the vastness of divine reality.

To see this is to remember that orthodoxy is not a wall but a window. It opens toward mystery. It breathes. It welcomes light.

The Spirit who reconciled the churches of the past is still at work—whispering through the silence of meditation, rising in the heart’s compassion, calling us to a faith large enough to contain wonder. For the Word made flesh is not finished speaking. Christ continues to become flesh wherever love and truth are born, in every people and every path where the divine and the human meet.

And when the Church learns again to see with such eyes, she will find that what divides us was never as vast as the mercy that unites us.

Author’s Note

This reflection is part of an ongoing conversation across the contemplative Christian world—a dialogue nourished by voices such as Paul Knitter, Fr. Laurence Freeman, the Quakers, and the World Community for Christian Meditation.

Within this broader communion, the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion have played a distinctive and generous role, offering a faith that is both sacramental and contemplative—deeply rooted in the Eucharist yet open to the silence of prayer, the movement of the Spirit, and the dialogue of hearts across traditions. From Canterbury to Cape Town, from Coventry to Washington National Cathedral, Anglicans have carried forward a tradition where Word and Sacrament, silence and service, contemplation and compassion, all converge.

In this spirit, Centering Prayer, revived through the wisdom of Fr. Thomas Keating and his fellow Cistercians, has found a natural home within Anglican and Episcopal communities. Its rhythm of stillness and surrender mirrors the ancient monastic heartbeat of the Church, reminding us that divine encounter often begins in quiet consent—an opening to God’s indwelling presence.

Through ecumenical partnerships and interfaith engagement, these communities have expanded the contemplative dialogue, seeking not uniformity but communion—a vision of the Body of Christ that honors diversity as an expression of divine creativity. Their liturgy invites the world into sacred beauty; their prayer books shape a rhythm of life that listens for God in the everyday; and their contemplative practice reveals that holiness is not an escape from the world, but its quiet, transfiguring presence.

Their witness joins that of Knitter, Freeman, the Friends, the Centering Prayer movement, and even those in the healing professions who recognize meditation’s restorative grace. All remind us that contemplation and compassion are never separate paths. The silence of prayer and the labor of love are one and the same movement of the Spirit—the eternal Word taking flesh again in the world.

Live Oak Friends Meeting - Houston Heights

—Ron Starbuck, Publisher
Saint Julian Press, Inc.
Houston, Texas

Saint Julian Press: Theology & Spirituality

The Language of Angels

Entering the Language of Angels

The Language We Were Given

The Deeper Memory

What Is Being Attempted

The Weight of Words

Presence

A More Careful Hearing

The Invitation Before Us

Suggested Reading

Learning To See One Another Again

An Introduction

I. What I Have Carried

II. What I Know to Be True

III. The Question That Persists

IV. What I Have Come to Understand About Violence

V. The Voices I Have Learned to Hear

VI. What This Has Taught Me to See

VII. Where This Leaves Me

Suggested Reading

Other Voices

A Note on Public Theology

On Being Human

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;I have called you by name, you are mine.”— Book of Isaiah 43:1

Palm Sunday & A Journey Toward Easter

A journey toward Easter.

I. The Quiet Question

II. The World We Are Learning to See

III. Two Ways of Meeting the Same Moment

IV. The Shape of Fear—and the Shape of Trust

V. Memory and the Work of Honesty

VI. The Divine Beyond Our Boundaries

VII. The Risk of Becoming Rigid

VIII. The Prophetic Boundary

IX. On Being Unafraid

X. A Closing Invitation

The Anglican & Episcopal Witness

Scripture, Tradition, Reason—And Something More

Mercy at the Center

A Tradition Resistant to Fusion with Power

Suggested reading

“Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.” — Luke 6:36

Time & Chances

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It is possible, now, to feel connected

without ever having been met.

I. The Nearness That Comes Too Easily

II. The Space That Cannot Be Scaled

III. The Substitution We Have Accepted

IV. The Quiet Disappearance of the Other

V. The World as It Now Feels

VI. The Discipline That Remains

VII. Where the Meeting Holds

Notes Toward the Meeting

Suggested Reading

Where Scripture Becomes Song

When Scripture Speaks in Poetry

How the language of the Bible forms the soul through mystery

The Psalms and the Formation of the Heart

The Prophetic Imagination

Jesus and the Language of Parable

Poetry and the Mystery of Faith

The Anglican Way of Reading Scripture

Learning to See

The Breath That Moves Through the World

I. A Quiet Conviction in the Christian Tradition

II. The Biblical Roots of This Belief

III. Reflections from Christian Theology

IV. The Kingdom and Reign of God Already Breaking Into the World

V. Living in the “Already and Not Yet”

VI. The Church as a Window

VII. Recognizing the Spirit

VIII. The Mystery of the End

Suggested Reading

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“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” ~ Saint Julian of Norwich

I. A Poet’s Reflection

II. A Brief Word on the History of the “Rapture”

“Fear not, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.”
— Book of Isaiah 43:1

Scripture, Tradition, Reason—And
Something More