“I will not let you go unless you bless me.” — Genesis 32:26 We often hear Jacob’s name in church. He is third in that list of three patriarchs whose names identify the God we are worshipping: “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” and sometimes we add “God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.”…

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian author Alexander Solzhenitsyn spent many years in the prison camps of Siberia. Along with other prisoners, he worked in the fields day after day, in rain and sun, during summer and winter. His life appeared to be nothing more than backbreaking labor and slow starvation. The…

In today’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about an unjust judge and a poor widow woman. Like all parables, this story has more than one layer of meaning. It was intended, Luke tells us, to remind the disciples about the need for persistence in prayer and in their lives. An obvious interpretation when reading this…

This parable of Jesus is commonly called the story of the unjust judge and the widow. It is a troubling parable. It ends with the promise that “justice will come quickly.” If you are satisfied that justice has come then you are excused from listening. Please pray, while not listening, for those of us who…