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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To see faith as a noun in Christianity, one must ask the question of what is faith and whence does it come?
If you don’t believe Jesus Christ—that is, God in the man born of the Virgin Mary—died for the sins of the world, then you can’t evangelize.
Don’t let anyone tell you the academy denies the concept of truth...good gracious, I hope by the end of the semester they are still alive.
We’ve been desperate—and it is a gift of God when we are, when we realize our lost condition!
In Christian terms, this is a perfect example of the doctrine of vocation, where God calls us to serve our neighbor.
He does not offer a linear route or a series of actions. He offers Himself. In very simple straightforward words, He declares, “I am the way.”
The more I heard the song, the more I heard the heart of the Gospel in the song.
Who should we baptize and when? How old does the person have to be? What if we get it wrong? Will something terrible happen to us?
She wasn’t so much giving up on her husband as giving up on herself. She was giving up trying to be the person who changes another person. It was going to take more than her to reform the man she loved.
Kierkegaard attempts to take us through Abraham’s mind as the patriarch prepares to sacrifice his son, his only son, his son whom he loves.
It's difficult enough for us to bear anothers' burdens, but carry another person's sin for him? Why would we do that?
Their love story was a long time in coming. He was 82 and she 74. And this was the first, and the last, marriage for both.