Politicians compete for the highest offices. Business tycoons scramble for a bigger and bigger piece of the pie. Armies march and scientists study and philosophers philosophise and preachers preach an...
These special holidays give rise to various liturgical calendars that suggest we should mark our days not only with the cycles of the moon and seasons, but also with occasions to tell our children the...
To be truly good means more than not robbing people . . . To be truly good means more than being righteously religious . . . To be truly good means being a good neighbor. . . . And to be a good neighb...
But before Christianity was a rich and powerful religion, before it was associated with buildings, budgets, crusades, colonialism, or televangelism, it began as a revolutionary nonviolent movement pro...
Our relationships with God go through similar phases sometimes. We aren’t comfortable with each other. The conversation doesn’t flow as well. We aren’t sure we can trust as before — or we aren’t sure...
When wealth is your god, weapons are your sacrament, and your own children are your sacrifice—
Our choice, it seems, is whether we will let our past and present sufferings be sufficient to soften and break us, or whether we will resist and harden ourselves so even more suffering is required.
Comfort and power can become great enemies of true spirituality, which explains why we often say that the prophets come not only to comfort the afflicted, but also to afflict the comfortable.
Why is it that the choice among churches always seems to be the choice between intelligence on ice and ignorance on fire? —as quoted by Diana Butler Bass1
I am convinced that Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion; he came to proclaim a new kingdom.
As I said before, evolution doesn’t bother me. If you tell me that God created the earth by hand in six days some thousands of years ago, I am impressed. If you tell me instead that God set a whole co...
The Church has little idea how unorthodox it is at any given moment. If a church can't yet be perfectly orthodox, it can, with the Holy Spirit's help and by the grace of God, be perpetually reformable...
Speaking of African Americans, the horrors of the African slave trade are more connected to the enslavement unleashed by Columbus than most people realize.26 The Portuguese began enslaving and exporti...
God unleashes history in the beginning. God helps the baby to stand in the beginning. But God is also out ahead, calling history homeward across the field or across the room. God doesn't force it. Som...
The cross calls humanity to stop trying to make God's kingdom happen through coercion and force, which are always self-defeating in the end, and instead, to welcome it through self-sacrifice and vulne...
These emerging Christian leaders realize that if their message isn’t good news for the poor, a message of liberation for the oppressed, it isn’t the same message Jesus proclaimed.
Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.
We must not define Jesus and his kingdom by fitting them within conventional understandings of kings and kingdoms. Rather, we must judge and deconstruct those conventional definitions in light of Jesu...
Whatever ember of love for goodness flickers within us, however feeble or small… that’s what the Spirit works with, until that spark glows warmer and brighter. From the tiniest beginning, our whole li...
The popular and domesticated Jesus, who has become little more than a chrome-plated hood ornament on the guzzling Hummer of Western civilization, can thus be replaced with a more radical, saving, and,...
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