Question: I have read one theory about the resurrection that we will come back as our best possible selves, say, 30 years old and healthy. What form of ourselves do you think we will come back as? Will I have my tattoos? Answer: The paradigm for our resurrection bodies is the risen body of Jesus. […]

Blackfire: The Books of Bairnmoor, Volume 1. James Daniel Eckblad. Eugene, Ore.: Resource Publications, 2012. 268 pp., $30.00 pb. “Elli Adams lived as if she were always leaving . . .” begins Eckblad’s elaborate and vibrant tale of four children who are called into a perpendicular world in order to save it.1 As in most […]

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was introduced to Dorothy C. Bass’ thoughtful and tremendously practical compilation Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. If my memory serves, it was required reading for a required seminary class on Spiritual Practices. Two “requireds” usually meant that my resistance was well-founded. […]

Running is the asceticism of our age. It is tempting to gape at the peculiar excesses of the Christian past; extreme fasts, lengthy silences, brutal penances and extravagant pilgrimages all feel very odd and distant to us today. And it is likewise tempting to wonder where, if anywhere, that drive to a seemingly superfluous discipline […]

I find an interesting irony in how for all the attention we give to our bodies and for all the bodies on display in our culture, as individuals we may be more secretive and insecure about our bodies than ever before. I am bemused to watch fit young men go into contortions to get dressed […]

Our body is the vehicle God has given us to reach out to the world, to take in the world and to receive what the world will give us. It walks with us through all our life — through our joys, our challenges, our sufferings. To know our body is to know our self. To […]

When it was discovered that I had colon cancer in 2006 my primary care physician said, “You will face your mortality and survive.” He was right. In my year-long chemotherapy protocol I witnessed my body dying. I will spare readers the details, but once my year of chemotherapy was complete my body bounced back—within a […]

Originally published on May 6, 2007; revised with additions on April 1, 2013 In February 2007, a reporter from the New York Times interviewed me and my now-wife Lela Schneidman for an article about “young yoga teachers”. We were 26 and had been teaching for under two years. It was exciting – they even sent […]

I. A Body’s Language I once saw a man with his right hand raised, a woman’s high-heeled shoe in it, and with his left hand was holding the woman by her throat. I was a passenger in a van full of college students from North Dakota State University and that day we were somewhere south […]

In January 2013, I led a class from the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago on a wilderness travel seminar to study the role of earth’s natural cycles in Christian prayer. Specifically, we explored classic patterns of Christian daily prayer and the liturgical year.1 The course, “Liturgy and the Cycles of Creation,” was held at […]