John Mark Hicks

Good Friday and then Easter! But a day is missing in that story. To move from Friday to Sunday one must walk through Saturday. Saturday, however, is a lonely day. Death has won. Hope is lost. Jesus of Nazareth lies in a tomb. His disciples are afraid, hiding and deeply depressed. Everything they had invested […]

My earlier attempts at blogging, before this past twelve months, were rather meager though I did post a considerable amount of material at my first site begun in September 2000.  I appreciate how the blog has been received by old friends and new ones. Thank you for your patronage. I hope our dialogue can continue […]

Continuing my quest to post previously published or presented materials, I have uploaded some new items–well, some old items (1990s) that are now newly offered on this website.  🙂 Baptism and Alexander Campbell. The 1990 book Baptism and the Remission of Sins (College Press), edited by David Fletcher, contained three articles I authored. They are […]

When Sheila died in 1980, I discovered that I was one who neither enjoyed nor desired to visit graves. For me visiting the grave was not very comforting. In fact, it was the opposite. The graveyard seemed too permanent. It contained too many granite stones which testified to both the pervasiveness and intransience of death. I didn’t […]

[My book on the Shack is now available on Kindle.] The first time I encountered the phrase “The Great Sadness” in The Shack it immediately resonated with me.  I knew exactly what my own “Great Sadness” was though I did not as yet know what Mack’s was or what Young’s own personal sadness was. Grief Renders […]

[My book on the Shack is now available on Kindle.] “Mackenzie, It’s been a while. I’ve missed you. I’ll be at the shack next weekend if you want to get together there. –Papa” God invited Mack to the shack (p. 16). His first gut feeling was nausea but it quickly turned to anger. He had […]

[My book on the Shack is now available on Kindle.] William P. Young’s The Shack became a national bestseller in 2008. It touched the hearts of many and generated hostile theological disagreement from others. I read the book last January.  Moved to tears several times, I was emotionally and intellectually engaged by Young’s storytelling.  This modern parable […]

When my wife and I exercise in our bonus room we watch some kind of DVD.  Today we watched the biography of St. Patrick.  Though I was familiar with much of his story, I was intrigued when the video narrated the following from his Confession. “I am, then, first of all, countryfied, an exile, evidently unlearned, one […]

“God seeps through the cracks.” I heard that statement today.  I thought it profound; wish that I had originated it (there is my pride); and wondered why I had never heard it before (I thought I knew everything!). It struck me as so true…at least in my life and I can only speak for myself. When […]

When I think of the dramatic story of Scripture in terms of divine presence (as I did in my previous post on theological hermeneutics), my mind always turns toward the absence of those whom I have loved and lost. This may seem a strange twist, but it is a natural flow for me because divine presence […]