We are continuing our series on Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, this time with the husband and wife scholars, Sylvia Keesmaat and Brian Walsh. Their book Romans Disarmed: Resisting Empire, Demanding Justice is one of my favorite explorations of Paul. Sylvia and Brian aren’t scholars who are content to stay in the Ivory Towers of academia. They combine close and thoughtful readings of the the biblical texts with a grounded and lived practice of justice. From standing alongside the unhoused in Toronto, Canada, near their home, to seeking to live out a care for creation at Russet House Farm, their off-the-grid permaculture learning center, Brian and Sylvia are tending to the ground of God’s work of resurrection in the world. I hope you enjoy this deep exploration of Romans and what it says to so many of our contemporary crises. You can find out more about Sylvia and Brian’s work at bibleremixed.ca and empireremixed.com. In addition to writing, Brian and Sylvia offer a variety of online courses. I’ve taken two of them, and they are fantastic explorations of scripture alongside contemporary culture and politics. Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

This episode is a bit different than anything I’ve tried—a short exploration of a biblical text with my bible and notes open before me. To read along, take a look at the passage below. And let me know what you think! I plan to offer more of these podcasts in the near future.Romans 1.1-7 (Common English Bible)From Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus, called to be an apostle and set apart for God’s good news. God promised this good news about his Son ahead of time through his prophets in the holy scriptures. His Son was descended from David.  He was publicly identified as God’s Son with power through his resurrection from the dead, which was based on the Spirit of holiness. This Son is Jesus Christ our Lord.  Through him we have received God’s grace and our appointment to be apostles. This was to bring all Gentiles to faithful obedience for his name’s sake.  You who are called by Jesus Christ are also included among these Gentiles.To those in Rome who are dearly loved by God and called to be God’s people.Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

This Lent, I’m offering a weekly exploration of the Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. Along the way, I’ll be posting interviews with a variety of New Testament scholars who will help us understand Paul’s major themes and the context of his letter. To get us started, here is a conversation with Beverly Roberts Gaventa, whose book When in Romans: An Invitation to Linger with the Gospel according to Paul is one of my favorite explorations of the letter. Below you will find some other suggested books that came up in my conversation with Dr. Gaventa.If you want to join my study of Romans, begin by reading through the whole of Paul’s letter in as few sittings as you can. There is a lot to work out, and we’ll be going through chapter by chapter, but its always helpful to get a sense of the whole of a biblical book before working back through slowly. You may opt to listen to the book the first time through. It will take about an hour. If you use an app like Dwellapp.io, you may want to choose a female reader, since Paul’s letter was carried and likely read by the Deacon Phoebe. Next week, in addition to another interview, I’ll be posting notes on chapters 1-4 of the book.Books on Romans and Paul recommended by Beverly Roberts Gaventa:* Paul and Time: Life in the Temporality of Christ by L. Ann Jervis* Galatians by J. Louis Martyn* Commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians by Ambrosiaster* The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth* Paul and the Power of Grace by John M. G. Barclay* Paul and the Person: Reframing Paul’s Anthropology by Susan Grove Eastman* The Word of the Cross: Reading Paul by Jonathan Linebaugh* The Story of Romans: A Narrative Defense of God’s Righteousness by A. Katherine Grieb Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

Sometimes I read a writer whose words burn with energy and light; setting blaze to my thoughts in a way that keeps burning for weeks after the initial spark. That was my experience when I began reading Graham Pardun’s Sabbath Empire newsletter. I immediately reached out to Graham and he agreed to have a conversation. It was as good to talk with Graham as to read him and I’ve continued to reflect on the insights he shared in our conversation. I hope this recording proves as fruitful for you as talking to Graham was for me.Below are a few of the books and writers mentioned in the conversation:* The Sunlillies is Graham’s book on “Eastern Orthodoxy as radical counterculture.”* Robert Alter’s translation of The Hebrew Bible* The Ancient Hebrew Lexicon of the Bible by Jeff A. Benner* “The Mossy Face of Christ” Mark Vernon conversation with Martin Shaw* Martin Shaw’s Substack “The House of Beasts & Vines”* Paul Kingsnorth’s Substack “The Abbey of Misrule”* Looking East in Winter by Rowan Williams* Orthodox Christian Prayers St. Tikhon’s Monastery Press* The Sabbath by Abraham Joshua Heschel Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

This week, on the eve of the Feast of Christ the King, I’m back with another conversation with my friend Joshua Daniel. The spark for this conversation was a speech given by Raphael Warnock in which he makes some theological claims about the nature of democracy. From there we followed the conversation to a wide range of questions about the church and politics. I hope you find our conversation helpful in your own discernment of these important topics!Some resources mentioned:* David Fitch interview with Stanley Hauerwas: “The Present Moment with Stanley Hauerwas.”* Andrew Root The Church After Innovation* Church of the Sojourners* Tim Otto* Ivan Illich The Rivers North of the Future* James K.A. Smith The Nicene Option* Hannah Arendt The Human Condition Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

In what we plan to be a series of conversations, I’m joined in this episode by Joshua Daniel. Joshua is an Episcopal priest serving at St. Columba’s in Washington, D.C. He also holds a Ph.D. in philosophy, specializing in the work of Wittgenstein. Joshua is one of the smartest and wisest people I know and everytime we talk I leave the conversation enlivened and enlightened. I hope you will be as well. To provide fodder for our time, we decided to engage with a recent piece by L.M. Sacasas that asks us to take stock of our technological liturgies. I hope you enjoy the conversation and stay tuned for more dialogues with Joshua in the coming months. Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

A reflection on the varied patterns of eating that reflect the rhythms of creation. Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

A reflection on Halo Top, Isaiah 55, and how fasting can help us feast. Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve recently been thinking about the practices that have been most helpful to me in my journey on the Christian way. Fasting is among them and I’ve been working to renew my own regular practice of it. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be offering a short essay on fasting, its practice, and why its a helpful discipline for the Christian life. Today is part 1, but each essay should be fairly independent of the others, so read in whatever order you come upon them. Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe

It is a rainy morning, each drop sounding with a chaotic rhythm on the tin roof. The incense is lit, nothing fancy—just a simple stick bought on the side aisle of the grocery store. It smells of cedar and myrrh. Before me there are a few scattered icons—St. Luke, patron of writers, the Holy Family, Mary and the Christ child. Before them a candle flickers, a spent “office” candle from church with plenty of life left for my purposes. It sits in a jar that once held spaghetti sauce, now filled with sand.I’m preparing for work, and as has become my habit on the best days, I start with a time in prayer—not the active, busy kind (my mind will begin its rush soon enough)—but the quiet sort that brings me to a center from which I can begin to move through the day. For many years I used a timer set up on an app for this purpose. 20 minutes with a basu bell sounding halfway through. I like the app and continue to use it. The best feature is that after my time of prayer I’m told of all the other people who were praying or meditating at the same time. Some of them I know, some are members of my church or friends from the wider circles of my religious life. Others are unknown to me, but still I feel a connection—all of us seeking the more beneath the surface of our frenetic lives.Lately, however, I’ve been using this clock less often. Earlier in the year I purchased a chotki from an Eastern Orthodox monastery. I’d been reading a book on the Jesus Prayer, a prayer that has been central to my practice for a long while now. I had always simply prayed with the rhythm of my breath: inhale “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God,” exhale “Have mercy on me a sinner.” But I was reminded in my reading that many Eastern Christians use a rope tied with knots to count their repetitions. The most common sort has a hundred knots, though I also often wear a bracelet of 33, a knot for each of the years of Christ’s earthly life. In the morning, it is the rope with a hundred knots that I use. It is black with a cross at the beginning and a tassel at the end of the loop. There is a wooden bead made of olive wood that marks the completion of each decade. To pray the cycle slowly and deliberately, resting on each of the hundred knots, takes about 20 minutes—roughly the same time I set on the clock. And yet, there is something different about the rope. It has a more natural rhythm to it than the external constraint of a timer.I’ve spent a good deal of my life struggling against my finitude, the basic creaturely limits of my existence in time. I always struggle to keep my “currently” reading books under seven and I am tempted to always take on more projects that I can possibly complete. I’ve become better over time, largely with the help of my wife who early in our relationship employed an annoying “bee, beep” sound whenever I started dreaming aloud of a new project while I was still in the middle of several others. She made me a collaged box with index cards where I could keep my ideas until I had time for a new project. It helped, but still I’ve worked to maximize time, blocking it off in clear segments, working against a clock in 25 minute intervals with 5 minutes of rest in-between or 90 to 120 minute sessions of “deep work.” These methods have been good in many ways, and I do not plan to abandon them altogether, but more recently I’ve begun to think in terms of rhythm rather than clocks. Life works according to cadences rather than the set increments of time. And one of the most dehumanizing features of modern life has been the ignoring of this fact by the systems of production. We make children go to class far too early in the day, ignoring their natural sleep cycles—all to fulfill the economic end of child care. Workers themselves are often tied to tasks in unnatural patterns that do not allow their bodies and minds to work to their fullest potential. Instead of embracing the normal sleepy hours around 2 p.m., when our circadian rhythms turn us toward an afternoon nap, we head for a bit more caffeine or sugar.Rhythm, as opposed to clocks, works within the context of a wider set of contingent realities—which is to say within the world of finite creatures. So it is that I have found myself moving more deeply toward ways of continuing the work, the disciplines, the essential patterns of my life, but tying them more to the native cadence and pace of their unfolding. For instance, I no longer tend to set an alarm to wake me, unless there is an unusual circumstance that demands it. I find that I naturally wake around dawn most mornings, and never so late as to be a problem with getting where I need to be. With the exception of dinner I also try to eat, as best I can, when I’m hungry—not according to some set schedule. Some days I have breakfast, some others I’m not really hungry until 1 p.m. This work of living from creaturely cadences rather than clocks requires a certain attention and awareness. It takes listening to the body and also attending to what is the important work now before me. When the energy is strong for a session of focused work, I do it, and when it would be better to go for a walk, I do my best to take the cue. With the chotki in hand, I’m free to move at the pace of my heart and soul. There are days when the motion of the rope slows me and others when it keeps me on pace from wandering too far in my thoughts. Either way, it is a pace set by my own fingers working in concert with the heart-mind deep within me. And though I don’t see the faces of friends who have shared the time of prayer with me, I feel connected in a different way. I do not need an app to tell me that when I pray, whenever I pray, I am joining in a great polyphony of hearts moving upward to the divine. I sense that in every knot of the rope I am sharing in a wider prayer. Each knot of this rope was tied as the monk who made it prayed over each twist of the fiber. And in praying with these words in this way, I know I’m entering a common prayer that stretches across centuries and continents. Clocks will continue to be a part of my life and I will still have mornings when I must wake with an alarm. I have not deleted my meditation app from my phone and I plan to keep using it, here and there, though I long ago let go of achieving any “streak.” But I am working more and more orient my life toward the cadence of the creaturely life, the pattern of light and seasons, the tilting and rotating earth. It is a rhythm I enter each morning with my fingers running along knots on a rope. Get full access to The Way We Practice at thewaywepractice.substack.com/subscribe