Kathryn Kraft et al. on Children, Religion, and Development

Kathryn Kraft (ed.), Children, Religion and Development: Perspectives on Spirituality and Practice, Routledge Studies in Religion (London: Routledge, 2026).

Many thanks to Tim Davy for drawing attention to the above open access volume, to which he has contributed a chapter.

Here is the abstract of the book:

‘Drawing from teachings and practices of diverse and distinct religious traditions, this volume takes a unique approach to exploring spiritual aspects of child development which may apply universally to children of all backgrounds. Research with children demonstrates how spirituality is a universal trait, an innate aspect of humanity, which may be and indeed often is nurtured within religious traditions. Though spirituality is not inherently religious in nature, its connection to religion has proven near impossible for scholars to sever. Nonetheless, spirituality is an integral aspect of human development with universal relevance. Child spirituality has been linked to aspects of well-being including prosocial coping skills, avoidance of risky behaviours, confidence-building, forging of meaningful affective ties, development of generosity, mental health and psychosocial well-being. While each chapter brings a unique religious perspective, it offers insight, case studies and practical applications that help nurture children’s development regardless of the child’s own religious tradition – in other words, the starting point is religion but the ending point is a shared vision for the well-being of children. With contributions from Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Ghana, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the UK, Australia, Canada and the USA, this book will be of particular interest to scholars of religion, theology, development studies and humanitarian studies.’

The book can be downloaded as a pdf or an epub from here.

Ruth Perrin on Resilient Faith

‘Resilient Faith’ explores findings ‘from a 2-year project exploring the shape and impact of their religious faith on millennial Christians living in Northeast England’.

Ruth Perrin builds on her earlier (2020) research on the faith lives of millennials ‘by examining the ongoing faith journey of that demographic group through the next decade’.

Six themes emerged from their accounts:

1. Maturing Millennial Faith: The desire to follow Jesus

2. How Faith Helps: The desire for hope and a future

3. Faith and Parenthood (or not): The desire for family

4. Faith and Friendship: The desire for deep connection

5. Millennials and Church: The desire for community

6. Faith and Purpose: The desire to bring about change

The report contains materials to facilitate discussion with millennials and consider practical implications from the findings.

See here for more details.

Adam Ramsey on Gazing at God

Every month, The Good Book Company make available digital versions of one of their books at no charge. This month (September 2025) it’s Truth on Fire: Gazing at God Until Your Heart Sings – ‘a call to know God clearly, worship Him wholeheartedly, and let truth set your heart ablaze’ – which is available in exchange for an email address here.

Centre for Public Christianity (June 2024)

Among other items, the Centre for Public Christianity has posted a ‘Life and Faith’ interview (here) with Elizabeth Oldfield on her book, Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times.

‘In this interview with Life & Faith, Elizabeth talks about “steadiness of soul” in an increasingly chaotic world and what it means to live in a small, intentional community or “micro monastery” that can fit 18 people around the dinner table. The conversation also covers how Elizabeth has managed to cultivate a space for profound chats across social divides in the podcast The Sacred, and what it meant for Elizabeth to flout careerist dogma and quit her stable, secure job to rest and lean into a different way of life.’

A.J. Nickerson on Modern Spirituality

The latest Cambridge Paper from the Jubilee Centre is available online here (from where a pdf can be downloaded here), this one by A.J. Nickerson:

A.J. Nickerson, ‘Modern Spirituality: Learning from the Poets’, Cambridge Papers 30, 4 (December 2021).

Here is the summary:

‘The last decade has seen striking growth in the popularity of alternative spiritual practices requiring neither doctrinal explanation nor institutional affiliation. This essay offers a brief account of such contemporary beliefs before asking what it is like to negotiate the tension between the assumptions of secularity and the impulses towards extra-ordinary forms of experience. Some of the richest accounts of modern spirituality come from the 1930s, and this paper examines some of the period’s profoundest poetic explorations of belief before considering T.S. Eliot’s analysis of the modern situation in the light of Christian revelation.’

The Kirby Laing Centre on Søren Kierkegaard and Spirituality

The inaugural volume of Nuances from the Kirby Laing Centre for Public Theology has just been made available, this one devoted to ‘Søren Kierkegaard and Spirituality: A Dialogue with C. Stephen Evans’.

It began as an event organised by the Centre, and all four presentations are available to watch from here, from where also a print copy of the journal can be ordered. Alternatively, a downloadable pdf of the collection of essays is available here.

Centre for Public Christianity (April 2020)

This month, among other items (including some on COVID-19), the Centre for Public Christianity links to an audio interview with James K.A. Smith on ‘The Story of Your Life’, looking at memoir, biography, and confession.

The Bible in Transmission (Spring 2017) on Children, the Bible and Spirituality

The latest issue of The Bible in Transmission, from Bible Society, is available online here, offering a collection of articles on ‘Children, the Bible and Spirituality’.

I have taken the ‘tasters’ of articles below from Steve Holmes’ editorial.

Steve Holmes

Editorial

Rebecca Nye

Spirituality as a natural part of childhood

Rebecca Nye opens our issue with a discussion of children’s spirituality, founded on her years of work observing children and listening to their explanations of their own lives. She defines ‘spirituality’ as ‘God’s ways of being with us, and our ways of being with God’. We do not need to create spirituality in our children, she argues. God is already with them and if we are attentive to what they say we will discover that they have ways of being with God. She describes childhood as a ‘highly blessed’ stage of life, offering evidence to suggest that significant experience of God is more common in childhood than in our adult years. Nye identities three spiritual needs of our children: to be deeply listened to when they articulate their spiritual questions and experiences; to be respected; and to have space for spirituality (in every sense of the word ‘space’).

Anne Richards

Children in the Bible

Anne Richards takes us to the Bible and what it has to tell us. God calls children to growth and development, she argues, even from the womb; because of this God wants every child to live. God calls and commissions children to minister, and adults need to respect and honour that. God values and blesses children. Richards shows us that these biblical truths about God’s attitude to children bring with them ethical demands about how we act and react. Her biblical exegesis leads to the same conclusions as Nye’s scientific observations: we nurture our children best when we respect and make space for God’s prior presence and activity in their lives.

Anna-Claar Thomasson-Rosingh

Read your Bible... if you want to grow

Anna-Clara Thomasson-Rosingh picks up these same themes as she writes about using the Bible with children. She contrasts a closed-down method of adults instructing children to understand Bible passages as the adult understands them with a willingness to ask open questions and learn together. She commends practices such as ‘Godly Play’ which invite such openness; her perspective reflects a quotation Rebecca Nye offered: ‘the only teacher in the room is Christ’ (Sofia Cavalletti). Thomasson-Rosingh’s perspective finally depends on faith: faith that Christ is present, teaching, when we encounter scripture together; faith that scripture will teach and form both us and our children even when we don’t have good answers for their (or our) questions; faith that the Holy Spirit can use even their (and our) confusion or resistance to grow us into the likeness of Christ. As she says, ‘If scripture is really inspired and inspiring then grown-ups do not have to defend either the Bible or God.’

Claire Smith

Tea towels and  togas: Bringing the Bible to life for every child in every primary school

Claire Smith writes about Open the Book, a project now run by Bible Society that demonstrates just these values in the context of primary school assemblies. Adults and children engage Bible stories together in creative ways, and everyone involved grows in their understanding of the scriptures. This is a huge good news story: thousands of volunteers in thousands of schools reaching hundreds of thousands of children regularly with the Bible and creating new mission opportunities for local churches. The ambition is larger, though: to bring the Bible to life in every primary school in England and Wales.

Trevor Cooling

Children’s spiritual development in school

‘Every primary school’ covers a multitude of communities, varying hugely in size, context, cultural mix and the range of religious backgrounds of the pupils. Trevor Cooling writes about the nation’s schools, secondary as well as primary, and the statutory duty they have to promote the ‘spiritual development’ of their pupils. In particular, he looks at how ‘Christian-ethos schools’ (what the media would report as ‘faith schools’) seek to be both faithful to their church foundation and also responsible to the multi-faith pupil intake they receive. He describes three very different schools that are successfully negotiating this challenge in their own contexts, and two innovative approaches to delivering subjects as diverse as hockey skills and geology within a Christian ethos.

Olwyn Mark

Passing on faith in the home

Because modern British schools receive pupils of all faiths and none, Cooling notes that ‘Christians can no longer expect the school to undertake the nurture of their child’s Christian faith.’This recognition demonstrates the importance of family and church contexts for the development of children’s faith. Olwyn Mark recently wrote a report, Passing on Faith, for the think tank Theos, in which she explores how faith is transmitted at home. She returns to this subject in our next article. The Bible clearly pictures and demands that the great stories of God’s saving work will be passed from parents to children in the home, but this is not happening in many Christian homes. Where it is, parents are fearful both of failure and of success – concerned that their children will be mocked or bullied at school for their beliefs.

That said, the evidence is clear that young people’s faith-identity is largely determined by their home life. Secular parents generally produce secular children. Christian young people are overwhelmingly likely to have grown up in a Christian home. Faith will be passed on most successfully, Olwyn Mark argues, through rituals, repeated embodied practices that instantiate beliefs and values. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the quality of the general home environment is also important: stable, happy, loving families more often lead to children embracing the faith of their parents.

Lucy Moore

Being a church for people of all ages: The messy model

There is also evidence that children will remain committed to Christianity if they experience church as something that belongs to them, not just to the adults. In our final piece, Lucy Moore writes about the astonishing growth of Messy Church, suggesting that what has made the model so successful is a commitment to being church for all ages together, rather than an adult church with children’s activities, or a children’s club with adults as spectators. In Messy Church we also see the creative shared exploration of scripture that our first three articles recommended. Moore also suggests that an orientation towards celebration and a focus on Jesus are crucial parts of the mix. Like Open the Book, Messy Church is a significant success story of our time.

Paul Williams

News from Bible Society

Knowing and Doing (Winter 2016)

The Winter 2016 edition of Knowing & Doing – ‘A Teaching Quarterly for Discipleship of Heart and Mind’ – from the C.S. Lewis Institute is now available online (here as a pdf), and contains the following articles:

Joel Woodruff

President’s Letter

Joel S. Woodruff, President of the C.S. Lewis Institute, suggests a simple way to bring unity among believers from different churches, races, political parties and professional backgrounds is to share our spiritual journey with others.

Randy Newman

The Gift of Music: Common Grace and Common Ground

Music is a great gift, with the power to take us to another world. Though music can move us so much, it makes a poor god! In this article, Dr. Newman expounds on both the common grace and the common ground that can be found through the gift of music.

Bill Kynes

Growing in Prayer Part 1: Hindrances to Prayer

A life of prayer is something to which we are all called and to which we should all aspire. Dr. Kynes discusses what it would mean for us to devote ourselves to prayer, to ‘pray continually’ as instructed by Apostle Paul.

Sandy Smith

Surprised by Belfast: Significant Sites in the Life of C.S. Lewis, Part 4, Queen’s University Belfast and the Surrounding Area

This final article in the “Surprised by Belfast” series focuses on an area that’s often referred to as the University Quarter. More specifically, Queen’s University Belfast is located in this sector – though C.S. Lewis did not study at Queen’s, his mother did. The fact that Lewis’s mother graduated from Queen’s and attended school at Methodist College is reason enough for Lewis enthusiasts to visit the University Quarter in Belfast.

Thomas A. Tarrants, III

Being Led and Transformed by the Holy Spirit

What does the New Testament mean by the phrase led by the Spirit? What is the fruit of His leading in one’s life? This article explores such questions on being led by the Holy Spirit.

Time with God: An Interview with J.I. Packer

This is an excerpt from an interview with J.I. Packer during a C.S. Lewis Institute event held September 26, 2008. J.I. Packer sat down and answered questions from C.S. Lewis Fellows and pastors in the Washington, D.C. area.

J.C. Ryle

What is True Practical Holiness?

In this excerpt from J.C. Ryle’s classic book Holiness: Its Nature, Hindrances, Difficulties, and Roots, Ryle presents twelve points to create a picture of practical holiness.

Learning from the Christmas Animals

This article highlights C.S. Lewis’s poem, The Nativity. We are reminded that, like Lewis, we should also seek after the strength, patience and innocence symbolized in the animals of the Christmas story as we approach this Christmas season. This is a reprint of December 2014 “Reflections”.

Joel S. Woodruff

Scrooges, Traditionalists and Nicholases

This devotional reminds us that this Christmas season, we are to remember that the Scrooges and Traditionalists are in need of a Savior. We need to commit to be more like St. Nicholas who shared his love for Jesus through both his words and gift giving.

On Being Overwhelmed

I wrote this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

It was Harold Wilson who allegedly said that ‘a week is a long time in politics’. In these recent momentous days, it looks as if that should be reduced to five minutes. As David Cameron himself quipped in his final Prime Minister’s Questions, this week alone has seen ‘resignation, nomination, competition, and coronation’.

It’s easy to see why our nation is not at ease. You may feel it yourself, or identify it in friends and colleagues, or see it reflected in your social media feeds. We’re experiencing what theologian David Ford has called ‘multiple overwhelmings’. Whether personally, professionally, or politically, it’s one thing to have a single event that knocks us off our feet; but what if the knocks continue to come thick and fast? Is it any wonder we’re confused, anxious, angry, distrustful, and fearful?

In all this, though, shafts of light manage to break through. I was one of millions who watched the video, courtesy of ITV news, showing a young Portuguese boy consoling a distraught French fan after France’s defeat to Portugal in the Euro 2016 final. It was a touching display of empathy, showing that it’s possible to embrace someone wearing another team’s colours – an embrace in which both are required to yield, the one to the other.

Just as arresting was the picture of a protesting woman taken during civil unrest in Louisiana. The juxtaposition of heavily-clad armed police officers and their apparently hesitant stance with a serenely-poised woman in a long flowing dress is striking. Whatever one’s views of the situation, it’s easy to see why the photo was quickly drawing comparisons with other classic protest images.

Both cases illustrate something of a refusal to be shaped by the prevailing culture, which Christians of all people should understand. Both show that while some ‘overwhelmings’ wound and crush us, others are life-giving and transformative. As David Ford says, the wisest way to cope is ‘not to expect to be in control of everything’, but ‘to live amidst the overwhelmings in a way that lets one of them be the overwhelming that shapes the others’.

What would it look like to be overwhelmed by gratitude? Overwhelmed by generosity? Overwhelmed by a passion for justice? Overwhelmed by a desire to see others thrive, even it comes at our expense? Given the resources available to us in the gospel, what might we be overwhelmed by today?

Joe Rigney on the Things of Earth

Joe Rigney, The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts (Wheaton: Crossway, 2015)

Some of us may remember singing the old hymn about turning our eyes on Jesus, looking full in his wonderful face, whereupon ‘the things of earth will grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace’. Joe Rigney confesses to being puzzled by that; actually, in the light of God’s face, his gifts become brighter, better, and more beautiful – whether it’s scrambled eggs, wool socks, or the laughter of children. Despite the ways we misuse God’s good gifts, meeting needs and giving joy through creation was his idea.

In places this is a demanding read, but rewarding too, arguing that we don’t have to choose between our love for God and our enjoyment of his gifts. They mutually serve and enhance each other for God’s glory and our joy, and that remains true even if we lose those gifts through suffering or if he calls us to give them up for his sake.

A Faith for Every None

I co-wrote with Neil Hudson, one of my colleagues, this week’s ‘Connecting with Culture’, a weekly email service provided by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity.

Christianity doesn’t rise or fall with affirmations from the national press, but it’s interesting to read them when they come along. Two recent ones in this case.

First up was an editorial in The Guardian, noting that Christianity’s move to the margins of public life ‘could change the country profoundly’, wondering – as we face the challenges of the next century – what will supply ‘a vision of humanity that transcends narrow self-interest’.

Then, writing in The Telegraph, Tim Stanley observed that in the peaks and troughs of the history of Christianity in Britain, one thing has turned around decline – evangelism. Christians, he says, have become their own worst enemy – killing their faith with silence. He has a point. We’ll never bring people to Jesus if we don’t tell them about him.

Both articles were reflecting on recent British Social Attitudes data which shows we are experiencing a rise in the number of self-labeled ‘Nones’ – those who, when asked the multiple-choice question about religion, identify themselves as ‘None of the above’. Apparently, it’s now the largest single identification in England and Wales.

Even so, having rejected formalised religion, people have not stopped engaging on a ‘spiritual’ quest. It has simply shape-shifted into different forms. Back in 1969, Peter Berger, a sociologist of religion, wrote of ‘a rumour of angels’, signals of transcendence that won’t disappear: desires for order, joy, hope, justice, and a humour that mocks the self-pretension of the world.

It doesn’t take too long in a conversation with a friend, colleague or neighbour to find such yearnings embedded in the ordinary experiences of life, a sense that things aren’t as they should be, a desire for connection to something higher. It’s not that people don’t believe in fairness and freedom and decency, but they might struggle to articulate a coherent story which makes sense of those beliefs.

We saw it exemplified in the Brussels Vigil in March, where people gathered together, lit candles, sang, declared their hopes that evil will not have the last word, and offered prayers to whoever. For those and those like them, we can say that there is a light which shines in the darkness, and the darkness will never overcome it.

Just because many in this generation have the confidence to self-identify as ‘Nones’ doesn’t mean that they don’t long for more. For them, as for others, we have good news.

Leaven 22, 1 (2014) on Christian Spiritual Formation

Leaven is published quarterly by the Religion Division at Pepperdine University. The issues are normally thematic, and often carry some interesting articles. The latest issue to be posted online is devoted to ‘Christian Spiritual Formation’, containing the following main essays:

David W. Wray

Sacred Rhythms: Harmonizing Work and Prayer

Earl Lavender

My Story, Our Story, God’s Story: the Function of a Livable Narrative in Spiritual Formation

Timothy H. Robinson

The Role of Nature in Spiritual Formation

Darryl Tippens

Spiritual Formation and the Dance of Embodiment: Lessons from James K.A. Smith and Augustine

Houston Heflin

A More Productive Harvest Through Adolescent Spiritual Formation

Chet Butterworth

Spiritual Formation as Seminary Curriculum: A Personal Perspective

Shirley D. Straker

What Has Happened to Me

Lisa Durr

Companionship for the Journey: The Gift of Spiritual Direction

S. Wesley Horn

Formed By Time: Living the Liturgical Year

Jackie L. Halstead

Silence and Solitude: Encounter with God

Jackie L. Halstead

Spiritual Formation: Annotated Bibliography

Theos Report on Religious Freedom

Nick Spencer, How to Think About Religious Freedom (London: Theos, 2014).

Yet another new report from Theos...

Here’s part of Jonathan Chaplin’s recommendation:

‘In this report, Nick Spencer cuts through the complexities and offers us a wonderfully clear and judicious overview of what is at stake, why religious freedom is so important to human beings and can’t be taken for granted, and how it can be more intelligently and fairly balanced with the legitimate claims for equal treatment and nondiscrimination of which our society is justly proud.’

More information is available here, and the full report is available for download here.

The Bible in Transmission (Spring 2014) on the Bible and Spirituality

The latest issue of The Bible in Transmission, from Bible Society, is available online here, offering a collection of articles on ‘The Bible and Spirituality’.

The essays have their origins in work carried out by the Centre for Bible and Spirituality at the University of Gloucestershire, which has already published two significant volumes of essays, both following conferences supported by Bible Society.

I have taken the ‘tasters’ of articles below from the editorial.

David Spriggs and Gordon McConville

Editorial

Andrew Lincoln

Contemporary Spirituality and Study of the Bible: Introducing a Relationship

Andrew Lincoln sets the scene with a discussion of the nature of spirituality and its relation to biblical study. He shows that spirituality remains a vigorous concept in an age that thinks of itself as post-religious, expressed in a desire for meaning beyond materialism.

Richard Briggs

Becoming a Spiritual Reader of Scripture

Richard Briggs approaches the topic from the point of view of the reader. He proposes a close connection between the character of the reader and their capacity to see what the text may be saying. His perspective on the role of the reader in spiritual reading is closely related to virtues such as wisdom, humility and obedience.

Gordon McConville

Reading Joshua for Spirituality

How can a book that has undeniably played a part in Christian spirituality also appear to advocate extremes of violence against ‘the other’? Gordon argues for close attention to the tendency of the text as a whole, its ‘ultimate semantic authority’, coupled with a critical reading of its uses in historical Christian interpretation, and an imaginative re-application of its motif of ‘crossing’ in the light of transformative moves towards reconciliation across the world’s hostile divides.

Dorothy A. Lee

Spirituality and the Gospel of John

Dorothy Lee considers what has been called the ‘spiritual Gospel’ of John. She wants Christians to rediscover the resources of the Bible for spiritual experience, asking, ‘what kind of spirituality is the reader invited, through the narrative, to experience?’ Dorothy shows how John’s framework for spirituality consists in the inner relationship of the Triune God, and ‘between the divine Spirit and the human spirit’.

Edith M. Humphrey

Receiving, Praying and Worshipping Together in the Body of Christ

Edith Humphrey... takes John 1.1 as her starting-point, and develops the relational, or corporate, character of Christian spirituality. She highlights the webs of connectedness that compose our identities, though often obscured by modern individualistic assumptions, but always implicit in the biblical texts.

Michael J. Gorman

Spirituality and the Book of Revelation

Revelation is prophetic, calling to faithfulness to Christ in contrast to the many powerful alternative bids for the allegiance of God’s people, whether ancient or modern. Faithfulness to Christ is by its character public: worship and spirituality ‘are always and everywhere forms of political activity’. Faithfulness entails witness, both prophetic and ‘evangelical’. The final word of Revelation is one of hope and salvation.

Philip F. Esler

Second Corinthians and Ecclesiology: APauline Message for Church Organisation Today

Connecting with Roman Catholic encyclicals, Martin Buber’s notion of ‘I and You’, recent work on dialogue, and a development in social identity theory called ‘psychological group formation’, Philip finds that Paul’s approach to leadership in relation to the Corinthians ‘is based in genuine dialogue and indeed communion between him and the Corinthians’.

Theos Report on Belief in Post-Religious Britain

The Spirit of Things Unseen: Belief in Post-Religious Britain (London: Theos, 2013).

The latest Theos report, The Spirit of Things Unseen, ‘is based on research, commissioned by CTVC and Theos and conducted by ComRes, which looks at the state of spiritual belief in “postreligious” Britain. It finds that spiritual beliefs, in particular the more esoteric ones, are no weaker today – and in some instances stronger – than they were in the past’.

More information is available here, and the full report is available for download here.

Michael Horton on the Ordinary

There is a lovely piece here by Michael Horton on ‘Ordinary: The New Radical?’, offering a warm apologetic for the ‘ordinariness’ and ‘everydayness’ in a culture – in which the church is often complicit – of restlessness and endless pursuit of The Next Big Thing.

Some highlights:

‘My target isn’t activism itself, but the marginalization of the ordinary as the richest site of both God’s activity and ours. Our problem isn’t that we are too active. Rather, it is that we have been prone to successive sprints instead of the long-distance run.  There’s nothing wrong with energy. The danger is that we’re burning out ourselves – and each other – on restless anxieties and unrealistic expectations. It’s an impatience with the familiar, sometimes slow, and mostly imperceptible aspects of life.’

‘Take marriage, for example. Is there a plan or program that allows you to expect and to measure progress? How do you measure a relationship?... And as you look back, what counted most: the extraordinary weekend retreat or the ordinary moments filled with seemingly insignificant decisions, conversations, and touches? You have distinct memories (if not photos) of the former, but probably not of the latter. The richest things in life are made up of more than Kodak moments.’

‘Is it any different with raising children? When it comes to the time we spend with them, the mantra among many upwardly mobile parents (especially dads) is “Quality Time.” But is that true? What happens in those seemingly mundane moments that are unplanned, unscheduled, and unplugged?’

‘It’s precisely because we need to look outside of ourselves – up to God in faith and out to our neighbors in love – that it’s important to talk about the ways we’re stepping over God’s activity in ordinary and everyday ways.’

‘Just think of all of the pastors, elders, and deacons whose service is as unheralded as it vital to sustainable discipleship; to all of the spouses and parents who cherish ordinary moments to love and be loved; and to all of those believers who consider their ordinary vocations in the world as part of God’s normal way of loving and serving neighbors right under their nose each day.’

Christian Reflection on Lent

The latest issue of Christian Reflection, published by the Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University, is now available, this one devoted to ‘Lent’. The whole issue is available as a pdf here, and an accompanying Study Guide is available here. The main articles, with their abstracts, are as follows:

Robert B. Kruschwitz

Introduction

In the Lenten season, which begins the Church’s second cycle of preparation, celebration, and rejoicing, we together work to root out the blindness and deception that prevent us from receiving each other as gracious gifts from God.

Norman Wirzba

Preparing for Joy

Lent is an invitation to honesty and clarity. It can be our preparation for joy because it is the concentrated and disciplined time when we together work to root out the blindness and deception that prevent us from receiving each other as gracious gifts from God.

Nicholas V. Russo

The Early History of Lent

The season of Lent appears after the Council of Nicea. With so many biblical precedents, did it really take the Church more than 300 years to seize upon the idea of fasting for forty days? The early history of Lent is interesting and complex; it is something of a ‘choose your own adventure.’

Scot McKnight

Lent as a Season of Responsive Fasting

Fasting in the Bible is almost always focused on a grievous condition. Fasting is a response to something instead of a means to something else. Lenten fasting, then, is a response to sins and the prospects of death in our culture, our nation, our church, and our own life.

Heidi J. Hornik

Penitence in Christian Art

Other Voices

Eric Howell

‘Come Near Today’

Eric Howell

Worship Service for Ash Wednesday

Carmen Acevedo Butcher

Walking the Walk (of the Stations of the Cross)

Walking the stations of the cross – a devotional path of reflection and repentance based on events in the passion and resurrection of Christ – is being adapted in creative ways today. How did this form of spiritual pilgrimage originate and why is it important for our discipleship?

Heather Hughes

Keeping Vigil

The season of Lent, and especially Holy Week, are traditional times for keeping vigil – an attentive openness to the work of God in our lives and in our world. But what does it mean to keep vigil today, when most of us no longer adhere to the strict discipline of late night prayer?

Alan R. Rudnick

Lessons from a Donkey

What needs to be untied in our lives, so that we can praise and honor God? When it is untied and let go, nothing can stop the love of God and neighbor that is inside of us. Palm Sunday is the day when we, like Jesus’ animal companion, are set loose to be used for the work of God.

Elizabeth Evans Hagan

Remember Our Dust

Lent is an invitation to live with the dust of our humanity – of broken relationships, of spiritual doubts, of fears about the future – to not spend all our energy trying to hide it or rid ourselves of it, but to invite dust into our homes for this season and see what we can learn.

Rachel Marie Stone

The Why and How of Fasting

Is fasting just a spiritualized form of self-denial, or is it essential to our discipleship? The theological reflections and cookbook reviewed here suggest fasting holds the promise of connecting us more deeply to God and to that which God cares about deeply.

Elizabeth Sands Wise

Adding In, Not Giving Up

Many are familiar with ‘giving up’ something for Lent. We should ask a more pertinent question: ‘What are we adding in for Lent this year?’ These books help us add practices of reading, cultivating humility, praying ancient texts, and digging into Scripture to encounter Christ anew.