Thanksgiving has come and gone, but we should seek to maintain a spirit of gratitude. You might have noticed that once again this year, trees, wreaths, lights, and decorations started going up very early as if many have been clamoring, “Bring on Christmas! We need it now!” 2021 has been another challenging year. This past Sunday began the season of Advent, which is the four-week journey to prepare for the birth of Christ. I love the Christmas season because we can feel a sense of hope in the air that is simply......

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The face-to-face connections we have in the church matter. I hope we never take this for granted. We are living in an age of mistrust, suspicion, and alienation. It has been well documented that in American culture, there is growing mistrust of government, political figures, religious institutions, media outlets, vaccines, university ideologies, and a wide array of other things. The result of this mistrust is a growing sense of loneliness, despair, and isolation, all of which were exacerbated by the pandemic. In his book A Time to Build, Yuval Levin makes the......

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Ralph Waldo Emerson famously argued that human beings are hard-wired to worship something: “That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshiping we are becoming.” In his book Counterfeit Gods, Tim Keller defines an idol as, “anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and your imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give. A counterfeit god is anything so......

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This fall, I am teaching a class at Vanderbilt called “Morality & Happiness in a Post-Corona World.” We are exploring morality, how the pandemic has permanently altered certain aspects of our culture (workplace, school, health care, religion, community life), and the different ways that we all seek to pursue happiness and live meaningful lives. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt identifies three different theories of human happiness. The first theory is called the “progress principle:” happiness comes from success and acquiring things. This principle clearly dominates our consumer culture. We......

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The next two Wednesday nights (Sept 29 and Oct 6), Hunter Mobley will be back at Woodmont at 6:30 PM in Carpenter Chapel to talk about “The Enneagram, Marriage, and Relationships.” We will also be live-streaming these talks. Dinner is being served beforehand in Drowota Hall. The Enneagram is a key tool when it comes to self-awareness and understanding others. One of the most common criticisms of Christians is that they are judgmental, self-righteous, and hypocritical. Gandhi famously claimed, “I would have been a Christian were it not for all the Christians.”......

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Twenty years ago, our nation was attacked. Do you remember where you were on that fateful Tuesday morning? Do you remember how you felt when turning on the TV? Shock. Anger. Sadness. Dismay. Outrage. Nineteen terrorists collaborated together to hijack commercial airplanes full of innocent people, turning them into missiles. Two of the planes flew into each of the Twin Towers. Another plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon. A fourth plane was on its way to either the White House or Capitol but was brought down by some very brave,......

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Life is unpredictable. We can not and should not take it for granted. Every day we wake up and we never really know what the day might bring. Last Monday, Aug. 23rd, longtime Anglican pastor of Nashville’s Church of the Redeemer, Father Thomas McKenzie, started a well-earned sabbatical. His first task was to drive his 22-year-old daughter Ella back to New Mexico where she was a student at St. John’s College. Tragically, their car collided with a tractor-trailer on Interstate 40 just west of Nashville and both of them were killed. I......

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