What is a child, and what is a child for? What qualities identify a child as such? Are they desirable or undesirable? Is a child an image of folly or of innocence, of weakness or of strength? An old Greek adage said, "Old men are like children once more." In our day we might think that endearing, and an image of innocent simplicity may come to mind. In the ancient world, however, the adage reflected the connection of children with ignorance.

Wince+Sing -- whose name is drawn from the Hopkins line, "on an age old anvil, wince and sing" -- was the nascent form of the Greystone project, and after the recent hiatus the blog is now able to take a slight turn in its story, a turn in the direction of a more visible link with Greystone.

Greystone’s Lydia Center for Women and Families has been formed to advance research and provide resources in the areas of women, marriage and family, and children. The Lydia Center encourages collaboration among scholars in biblical, theological, historical, linguistic, and sociological disciplines for research output that is serviceable to clergy, academic and religious institutions, and families.

Do you want to see reconciliation? Luke locates it in the seam of a double quaking.

As I look out my window this morning at the sun rising over my house to shed its light on tops of the trees behind it, a golden crown is set on a forest still caught in the dead of a hard winter. A long awaited spring is still kept at bay…

It is a sobering thought, but the prevalence of porn may push us in one of two directions: women may decide porn can no longer be a relationship "deal breaker" and so "marry down" in order to marry at all…

The morning sun met me today with the numbing news that the youngest daughter of longtime family friends had committed suicide after a long struggle with depression.

Speech, as communication coming from God's image bearers, is central to who we are, to our relationship to the God we are commanded to love with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to how we care, or fail to care, for our neighbor.

In his little On Art and Life, a selection from his landmark study, The Stones of Venice, John Ruskin, like Wendell Barry, reflects on humanity and labor in a way that ought to find beautiful translation in the Christian life, communal nurture, family and especially parental wisdom, and pastoral care.

The following lines are the final words of an article titled "The Place of Law in the Gospel of Glory," just submitted for publication with the Confessional Presbyterian Journal as part of their "sic et non" series exploring debated issues within Reformed circles.

"In the beginning, God..." Drawing near to the vast, unwieldy edifice which is the world of the Bible, we assume we enter here by way of the portico of the natural-supernatural distinction.

More than you might think, but that question, of course, is a riff on Tertullian’s famous query, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

What does the practice of Christian giving say about the God we know and confess?

When we listen to the Tempter's suggestion that God has failed us because medicine has not prevented death in the young or the old, the Tempter proves once again that he is subtle enough to entice with half and partial falsities, not whole ones.

Laughter and weeping are moments in which our efforts to suppress these truths about ourselves momentarily and spectacularly fail. The connection we always have with the invisible, the glorious, and the divine erupts, against our better judgment as materialists and naturalists (in atheistic terms).

The femme fatale tradition, that tantalizing woman who cannot be had, that symbolic marker of our pessimism regarding what will happen to us at the end of our waiting, stands opposite the hope of the Christian faith.