Everything That Rises

Hell. The word "hell" is mentioned only 13 times in the Bible (that is the New Revised Standard Version of the Old and New Testaments, excluding the Deuterocanonical books, for those of you keeping tabs). Eleven of those times it is in fact Jesus who speaks the word, which is the Greek word Gehenna (if you'd like to learn more about Gehenna and the history behind the word, you can click here ). To give you a sense of perspective, while the word "hell" is translated some 13 times in the entire Bible, the word translated "poor" is used some 25 times just in the four gospels of the New Testament (of course in both cases this excludes allusions to the ideas of hell, poverty, etc.). Hell has been the topic of some of my more "theological" discussion as of late, so I thought it might be useful to put some of my own thoughts on the subject down if for no other reason than to simply sort them out. I have to say I'm not "thrilled" abo

A year ago, the most influential person in my life passed away. I wrote the words below a year ago in reflection of her influence. Rosie Orene was born on a day no one remembers in a year no one recalls, in a place too soon forgotten. She grew up poor when poor wasn ’t noble. Her father was a drunk, her siblings were transient, and as a little girl she sat beside her mother’s bed as she slipped from this world into Beulah Land. She grew up the audience of violence, watching her father and brothers fight over booze money and the last spoon of peas. She lived in the gritty reality of a romanticized world and was all too often its victim. Like the other great heroes and heroines of human history, her adolescence is untold, but maybe that is best for all of us, to protect her innocence and the great magnitude of her selflessness. Still, she grew to be a woman, a wife, and a mother. As a woman, she was anything but dainty. She had more in common with “Rosie the Riveter” than merely a name…