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My friend, Byron, wrote and successfully defended his PhD dissertation on the Apocalypse.  After he died, I was given a copy of his work, although before that, he had told me his understanding of what the Apocalypse or the Book of Revelation was all about.  There were two points that Byron made to me.  The first was that it was a message sent to particular Christian communities at a very definite time in history, a time when they had just survived a terrible persecution and were facing a new ...

In this week’s first reading from Exodus, the voice in the burning bush said that I was known to your fathers as “God Almighty” but now “I Am Who I Am.” The sacred letters that form this new name of God, “YHWH” were so sacred that whenever these letters were read out loud they were replaced by the word which in English is “Lord.”

But in English we are not so reluctant to use these words. “I am…” is ...