This is an excerpt from Chapter 6 in Sinner Saint: A Surprising Primer to the Christian Life (1517 Publishing, 2025). Sinner Saint is available today from 1517 Publishing.
On its journey from Byzantium to Constantinople to Istanbul, this special place helps us understand the broader arc of Christian history, which goes on until Christ's return.
We needn’t fear statistics and studies as palm readings into a certain future. God is God, and his Spirit is alive through his Word.

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St John of the Cross' feast day on December 14 commemorates the day of his death in 1591, at the height of the Catholic renewal movement that followed the Reformation.
This is Christmas. It is Jesus becoming all sin from generation to generation.
Christ urges us to love our neighbor as He loved us, forgiving all of their sins - giving them the absolving, shirt-pulling, embrace that we would also want.
It wasn’t a perfect image, but it was still there, even in its cartoonish movie magic distortion. It was an element of the Gospel right there in front of me.
Jesus overcame sin, death, and Satan on the cross. His bloody suffering and death marked this sinful world's defeat.
Love continues to gently but endlessly pursue the narrator, despite his persistence in pulling away in the opposite direction.
The parable of the wedding banquet in Matthew hinges on whether a guy is wearing the right costume for the party.
Christ crucified is at the heart of both our freedom from sin and death and our freedom to serve and love our neighbor.
You who would be a law unto yourself, Christ is the gospel unto you, proclaiming you forgiven.
After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.
The best synonym I can think of for Biblical meditation is "wonder." To meditate upon God's word is to wonder, as a child wonders at the stars.
Viewing the Bible as literature is an essential and natural way of engaging the text. But there are also ways in which this practice can get lost.