For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God has a soft spot for religious strangers, both as agents of divine blessing and recipients of divine grace - to the point that God sometimes chooses o...
Because Jesus died instead of ushering in the messianic age, Paul responded with a doctrine of atonement. Because the risen Christ struck his followers as very close kin to God, the early church respo...
At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
I noted that it is sometimes hard to tell whether you are being killed or saved by the hands that turn your life upside down.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings. —Wendell Berry
Human beings have a hard time regarding anything beautiful without wanting to devour it.
We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light. —H...
When visitors come to a worship service in my own religious tradition, a great deal depends on how warmly they are welcomed and whether they feel included or excluded by what they hear during the shor...
When religious arguments based on the perspective of a single century or culture reach a high pitch, or when people who seem to have read only excerpts of the Bible use it to propose legislation, I re...
Instead, I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need...
For reasons no one may ever understand, God decided it would be helpful for people to be different instead of the same, if only because it would slow them down a little bit. God decided it would be go...
By most estimates, 70 percent of our sense receptors are located in our eyes. When they are working, they can take over most of the duties of all other senses.
If we could learn to be attentive every moment of our lives, he said, we would discover the world anew. We would discover that the world is completely different from what we had believed it to be. Bec...
The most deeply one sinks into one's own religious truth,' Knitter says, 'the more broadly one can appreciate and learn from other truths.' That has been true for me, both as a teacher and as a spirit...
Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish—separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the dist...
To lie flat on the ground with the breath knocked out of you is to find a solid resting place. This is as low as you can go. You told yourself you would die if it ever came to this, but here you are....
I thought that being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was, in other words, and it was not until this project failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more usefu...
E. B. White once wrote, I can’t decide whether to enjoy the world or improve the world; that makes it difficult to plan the day.
Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; rather, seek what they sought.1 —Gautama Buddha
Some are questioning whether the churches they grew up in have anything to offer them as they make their ways in a culture of many cultures with many views of truth, some of which make a great deal of...
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