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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Though not without his faults, Anselm of Canterbury is unquestionably one of the great theologians of the last millennium.
Transfiguration is like a farewell party for a dear friend drafted and going off to war. We celebrate all that has brought us there, we rejoice in our friend, and yet we know we are sending him off to great danger.
He is no sweet and sappy, romanticized and Disneyfied, cartoonish Christ. He is ferocious, free, untamed, and heaven-bent on not leaving the battlefield until the war is won and he makes his enemies a footstool for his feet.
This article begins an eight-part series inspired by the Lenten themes of catechesis, prayer, and repentance found in the Lord’s Prayer as Luther taught it in his Small Catechism.
There is true help in the midst of our pain. Someone who suffered as we suffer, who embraced all our pain in his suffering and death on a cross.
The promise of Advent is the promise of the lamb slain, who is born and given for us so that we don’t have to fear sin, death, and hell.
Mary’s virginity has to do with the story of a jackass king, two growling enemies, a young lady, and a big, bad Assyrian dog.
While we do not have an answer, we do have a promise. A promise given to us by a God whose one and only Son was himself slaughtered by those terrified of losing their power.
By every conceivable category, grace shouldn't exist. It shouldn't have been bestowed. It's the card in God's trick we never saw coming.
God will not repent. He will not repent of His promises. He will not change His mind regarding His selfless, self-sacrificing, inconceivable love for sinners.
Abraham knew that this was a God who kept his promises.
God does not combat the impending armies of Satan with might and power, but with the weakness of a babe.