Gene Edward Veith Jr.'s Blog, page 419

Easter, continued

After Jesus rose from the dead, He spent 40 days on earth.  Then He ascended, and ten days later He sent the Holy Spirit.  So Easter is a whole season, lasting 49 days until Pentecost (which means “fiftieth day”).  So it’s still Easter, and I hope the joy of Christ’s resurrection continues with you. What [...]

Opening Day

In yet another day marking the renewal that is Spring, today is the new baseball season’s Opening Day.  (That it falls on April Fools’ Day is just a coincidence.)  In observance of this significant holiday for us baseball fans, I will link to this column by E. J. Dionne, linking baseball to religion, a notion [...]

April Fools’ Day clearing house

Happy April Fools’ Day!  This is the day that the internet and other media are full of pranks, hoaxes, and tall tales.  So if you come across any, please report them here.  Thus we can honor the day.

The Crucified God

For Lent I’ve been reading Jürgen Moltmann’s The Crucified God.  It’s sophisticated theology, interacting and often agreeing with radical and liberal theologians, and yet there are treasures on virtually every page.  Here are some quotations: “When God becomes man in Jesus of Nazareth, he not only enters into the finitude of man, but in his [...]

Baptism, Good Friday, & Easter

Have a blessed Good Friday, everybody, and a joyous Easter.  Towards that end, I give you two remarkable texts from God’s Word, which detail how Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection, is OUR death, burial, and resurrection, and how each of us was and is intimately involved in His Cross and in His empty tomb.  From [...]

Easter was NOT based on a pagan holiday

(This is a re-run from this blog in 2011, but it still needs to be said.  For more on this topic go here and here. ) The charge is that the word “Easter” derives from the name of a pagan fertility goddess “Eostre.” It is said that Christians took over a spring festival devoted to [...]

Why the Lord’s Supper

Some years ago, I, as a Lutheran, was invited to write about the Lord’s Supper in Tabletalk, a magazine with mostly Reformed readers, which was doing special issue on the sacraments.  I didn’t want to argue, just explain what Holy Communion means and can mean in the life of a Christian.  I offer it to [...]

Jonathan Swift and the Jesus stompers

You have doubtless heard about the college that had students stomp on the name of Jesus as an exercise in a class on cultural understanding.  I noticed the parallel to something that happened in Gulliver’s Travels in which the satirist Jonathan Swift portrays Dutch traders as being willing to trod on a Crucifix as a [...]

Cost increases with Obamacare

More bad news for the coming Obamacare trainwreck.  From the Associated Press: Medical claims costs — the biggest driver of health insurance premiums — will jump an average 32 percent for Americans’ individual policies under President Barack Obama’s overhaul, according to a study by the nation’s leading group of financial risk analysts. The report could [...]

The woman who anointed the feet of Jesus

Thanks to Frank Sonnek for introducing me to this sonnet about the sinful woman in Luke 7:36-50.  It’s by the son of the great Romantic poet Samuel T. Coleridge!  (Just as the great hymnwriter Christopher Wordsworth was the nephew of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth.  Both Romantic poets, who together penned the revolutionary Lyrical Ballads, [...]