One of my favorite Gospel passages, the story of the demon-possessed boy with the despairing father, is the Gospel reading for today. Excerpted from Loosing ...

"The Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and th...

Mark 13 is a well-constructed intercalation in which Jesus teaches four of his disciples privately about the destruction of the Temple and his Second Coming ...

We come now to the grand conclusion of Jesus’s public controversy in the Temple. Mark sets the scribe and the widow in contrast, certainly, but they’re repre...

In closing the discipleship section, Mark presents Bartimaeus as the most powerful paradigm of discipleship on offer. The discipleship section opened with th...

The discipleship section comes toward a close with the third Passion prediction, after which the disciples, far from acting like children, comport themselves...

In Mark's preceding material, Jesus has taught the Twelve—celibates, the first clergy—about the radical demands of discipleship as he traveled by stealth thr...

Jesus remains in Gentile territory. The route outlined in Mark 7:31 (from Tyre through Sidon and then, presumably, around the north and east side of the sea ...

The relating of John the Baptist’s death is the B section of a sandwich, the main panel of this iconic triptych. The sandwich means mighty works wrought by t...

The Transfiguration in Mark’s Gospel is many things. It fulfills and explains Jesus’s cryptic words in Mark 9:1, it reveals Jesus as the summation of the Old...