The following entries are excerpts from Chad Bird’s new book, Untamed Prayers: 365 Daily Devotions on Christ in the Book of the Psalms (1517 Publishing, 2025), pgs. 311 and 335
Why did the church dedicate a day to St. Michael anyway? Who is he, and what does he do?
The Antichrist offers another continual presence. It is every whisper that tempts us toward autonomy, that tells us to carry it alone, that insists suffering is meaningless.

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When we try to create meaning for our lives or transform Jesus into a mere example, the Holy Spirit comes to us, with a preacher in hand, ready to unleash a sermon like Louis Armstrong blasting out "When The Saints Go Marching In" on his trumpet.
The Pastoral Prophet: Meditations on the Book of Jeremiah, written by Steve Kruschel, is available now for preorder and will be released by 1517 Publishing one week from today, on May 11. The following is an excerpt.
When we proclaim Jesus' death we are, at the same time, preaching that this cup from which we drink is the cup of salvation for all who believe and receive it.
The following is an excerpt from “The Sinner/Saint Lenten Devotional” written by Kyle G. Jones and Kathy (Strauch) Morales (1517 Publishing, 2019).
The parable of the two sons whom their father sent to work in the vineyard is not a well-known parable--or one about which we hear many sermons. What does it mean? And what does it tell us about life in the church? In this article, Del Campbell explores this parable for us.
The gospel promise is that God in Christ knows exactly what your temptations are and still bids you find protection from them in him.
When Luther's barber, Peter Beskendorf, asked him how to pray, Luther wrote him an open letter that has become a classic expression of the "when, how, and what" of prayer. It is as instructive today as when it was first penned it in 1535.
The devil is to be taken seriously, but we should also not give him more credit or more power than he has after being defanged by Christ’s resurrection.
The people should find their lives in your sermon, and no one’s life is unaffected by the coronavirus right now. It is the very fact that I can make such a blanket statement, free of all caveats, which makes it so necessary for us to preach on it.
The book, Paul and the Resurrection: Testing the Apostolic Testimony, by Josh Pagán, has just been released by 1517 Publishing. In this innovative, interdisciplinary study, Pagán combines the analytic tools of history and philosophy to explore and evaluate competing explanations of Paul's belief in the Resurrection of Jesus. In this article, he introduces us to his book, which is available now on Amazon (see link at close of article).
Despite the grave threat of martyrdom during his roughly thirty years of ministry, St. Patrick persevered and experienced enormous success.
In the vortex of uncertainty and upheaval, what’s the best thing we can do? Seize the ordinary.