Tag Archives: Bible

Mary’s Dangerous Request at Cana

By Robin Bates | Published: January 16, 2016

In his poem about the wedding at Cana, Rilke sees Mary as a proud mother who inadvertently pushes her son towards his destiny by asking him to perform a miracle. On reflection, she realizes what she did.

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Theoretically, a Season for Everything

By Robin Bates | Published: September 12, 2015

The soul, says Amichai Yehuda in this Rosh Hashanah poem, knows that, for everything there is a season. The body, on the other hand, gets the seasons all muddled up.

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Though Thou Art in Thy Blood, Live

By Robin Bates | Published: May 31, 2015

Spiritual Sunday A couple of weeks ago my library reading group discussed Marilynne Robinson’s Lila, the third novel in what one member described as a triptych. I love Robinson’s depiction of the Congregationalist minister John Ames in Gilead, and Lila gives us the backstory of the woman that Ames marries as an old man. (Home, […]

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(Limitless Pity Makes All Large & New)

By Robin Bates | Published: January 25, 2015

Spiritual Sunday Today’s Old Testament reading is the episode in the Book of Jonah after that conflicted man returns from the whale episode and this time does what God has commanded him to do, which is to prophesy to the people of Nineveh about their wickedness. In the Keith Schlegel poem I have chosen, one […]

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And God Said, “That’s Good”

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2015

James Weldon Johnson’s version of the Genesis creation story accords with some contemporary theological theories of God.

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Lit, Like Christ, Is Divinity Made Manifest

By Robin Bates | Published: December 28, 2014

The opening lines of the Book of John can be used to describe how literature operates in the world.

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Wrestling with (My God!) My God

By Robin Bates | Published: August 3, 2014

The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel finds powerful expression in Gerard Manley’s Hopkins’ “Carrion Comfort.”

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The Evil I Do Not Want Is What I Do

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2014

Spiritual Sunday  In today’s Episcopal service we encounter a passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans that I particularly like, in large part because it captures an internal conflict that we can all relate to. It also reminds me of a passage from Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867). First, here’s St. […]

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Christianity in the Slave Owning South

By Robin Bates | Published: January 19, 2014

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” shows how the Bible can be misused and how we should interpret it to promote social justice.

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