Thank you for stopping by. Take a moment to study the scene above. The background is a mural portraying main street of sixth-century Jerusalem. The foreground is busy with a scrum of modern pilgrims. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to step into that ancient street and learn about Jerusalem of 1500 years ago?

In fact, the mural is on a wall today in Old Jerusalem that stands at the end of a stretch of the actual sixth-century street. I took the picture below with my back to the mural. Now you see pavement stones and columns that once lined the Cardo Maximus (main north-south street) of Byzantine Jerusalem.

I invite you to step into the world of the Bible and the early church by following this blog. I will not spam you! Once or more a month, photos will appear with brief commentary on a site or object related to biblical or church history. A few insights about the subject of the picture will follow, along with a few devotional ruminations.

The blog name “peace pilgrim” reflects my desire to travel, learn and worship with particular focus on matters of peacemaking, liberation, and mission. The Bible (like our world today) often is troubling and complex. Lofty ideas of caring for vulnerable people get mixed in with accounts of conquest and violence. Radical devotion to God stands alongside accounts of greed and sin.

This wide spectrum of human experience makes the Bible a marvelous frame of reference for spiritual, ethical and vocational reflection. I love faith stories from the past and opportunity to visit places where heroes or villains of the biblical narrative played on the stage of history.

With all its messiness, the Bible portrays a long trajectory from Creation and Fall to New Creation in Jesus Christ. God is calling a people to live into God’s future of healing and hope. I want to place every posting of this blog somewhere on that long trajectory. To adapt a phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the arc of salvation history is long, but it bends toward God’s shalom.

I look forward to traveling this way with you. Please pass on the link to anyone you know who might be interested.

Nelson Kraybill

I invite you to enter your email address in the designated box at the edge of this webpage (if you have not already subscribed), and click Follow. You’ll get a notice every three weeks when I put up a new blog post.