photo courtesy of usgs.gov

“Death be not proud,” taunted John Donne. “One short sleepe past, wee wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; death, thou shalt die.” Death interrupts our view of eternity, a fearsome jalousie obscuring a future we must approach. Like Donne, we console and distract ourselves by turns with bravado, with pleasure, with laughter and finally with God.  Peter Berger, eminent sociologist of religion, wrote that “the power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.”

Religion masters death by writing it into the second act of a cosmic drama of the soul.  For Christians, the principal figure in this drama is Jesus, whose own death and resurrection conquered death for all.  The glory of this victory, and its appalling price,…

Photo courtesy of the Episcopal School for Ministry

A group of students and friends of the Episcopal School for Ministry gathered at Eden Seminary on April 18 for a lecture entitled “Living the Resurrection” and given by the Rev. Dr. Ralph N. McMichael, Jr., Canon for Ministry Formation in the Diocese and Dean of the School.  I’m including an account of the lecture below, but first a few words about the the Episcopal School for Ministry are in order.  ESM meets monthly on the campus of Eden Seminary in Webster Groves and is still accepting registrations for the summer term, which gets underway properly on May 15 & 16.

This is a school for anyone who understands ministry to be an integral part of life, rather than being exclusively aimed at those whose ministries play themselves out in a professional or institutional capacity.  My experience of the place is that it’s about ministry as discipleship, not ministry as…

“Easter is a journey.”  This welcome reminder was central to an Easter message from Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  In a literal sense, it reminds us that Easter is a whole season, not just a single day.  Eastertide, or the Easter season, lasts until Pentecost, which this year falls on May 31.  That gives Christians 50 days to celebrate the Resurrection in a particular and intentional way.  But one might ask, if we’re supposed to celebrate the Resurrection every Sunday, as we are, what need is there for an Easter season?

I think of it this way.  Resurrection, like conversion, is a process as much as a destination.  New life often comes in a form that we don’t recognize, such as an encounter with a person we don’t much like, or having to take a job that we don’t think suits our talents very well, or moving to a new place…

The 8th century B.C. stele of Kuttamuwa (Credit: Eudora Struble, University of Chicago)

University of Chicago archaeologists have uncovered an ancient monument to the soul of a royal official in southeastern Turkey. The find, a sort of tombstone called a “stele,” is significant because it indicates a belief in the soul apart from the body. The inscription writes that the royal official’s soul now inhabits the stele itself.

This also means that there was ancient diversity in beliefs about the soul. As The New York Times puts it: “the stele provided the first written evidence that the people in this region held to the religious concept of the soul apart from the body. By contrast, Semitic contemporaries, including the Israelites, believed that the body and soul were inseparable, which for them made cremation unthinkable, as noted in the Bible.”

This latter idea of “embodied soul,” of a deeply integrated concept of body and soul woven together,…