Watch for upcoming details regarding the IWS choir. The choir is open to all (including new and returning students). We’ll sing at Wednesday night Opening Convocation and for Commencement. Join Dr. Sharp for another great time of adding our voices to the joy of IWS! Please Dr. Sharp to let him know your intentions.Read More
We are all part of the problem. . . . But only one man is the solution, and his name is Jesus. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 111.Read More
Every Sunday is a “little Easter.” Every Sunday of the year is a celebration of the Easter event. The work of the people in “doing the Christ event” through memory and hope is the source for personal and corporate formation into resurrection spirituality. -Robert E. Webber, Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (Grand...Read More
The primary metaphor for the Easter season is the church as the resurrected people living a resurrected spirituality. Because of Easter we are in union with Christ and are called to live in our baptismal identity in his resurrection. This essential theme of Easter cannot be communicated in a day. It takes a season. -Robert...Read More
A year ago during Lent, I memorized the “Exsultet” the mid-1st millennium-chant that opens the Saturday night Easter Vigil service. Ever since, I have found myself constantly ruminating over the Exsultet’s profound words of hope.Read More
The biblical metaphor for Easter spirituality is found in baptism. The baptized life is a life that is lived in the pattern of death and resurrection. . . . This is a daily, existential, moment-by-moment experience as we choose in this or that situation to die to the sins for which Christ died and choose...Read More
There is perhaps no greater time of year to focus on the Great Story of God's work in history than Holy Week. In honor of this holy season, I thought I'd pull out of our IWS treasury the classic Un-Worship Song "All About Me."Read More
The spiritual life is a calling to become fully human after the likeness of Christ, who, being united with God, has shown us what humanity, united to God, was intended to be. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 103.Read More
Spirituality is our union with God through our union with Jesus Christ accomplished by the power of the Holy Spirit. The symbol of this union for the Christian is baptism. The spiritual life that results from this union is dying to sin and rising to the new life in Christ by the Spirit. The means...Read More
Worshipers are not a cheering section for God. The problem with this kind of worship is not only that it is an accommodation to culture but that it is also a severe example of self-situated spirituality. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2006), 95.Read More
Experience in worship is not my immediate pleasure or even my immediate response. The focus of experience is not on my experience of God but on how God as the subject of worship forms me through word and sacrament and thereby changes my life. -Robert E. Webber, The Divine Embrace: Recovering the Passionate Spiritual Life...Read More
Lent is the time to identify a power working against us and crucify it with Christ and bury it in the tomb, never to be raised again. . . . [Fasting] controls the passion for food in order to deal with a passion of another sort that holds us in its grip. The purpose of...Read More
Lent . . . calls us back to God, back to basics, back to the spiritual realities of life. It calls on us to put to death the sin and the indifference we have in our hearts toward God and our fellow persons. And it beckons us to enter once again into the joy of...Read More
I am so delighted to offer the full recordings and notes from my fall online live course, “On Christian Wisdom.” From the states, to Malaysia, to Great Britain, we experienced a rich fall together. For those of you who are just curious, please check it out. If you can’t get in, simple instructions are available...Read More
