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...
[In the story of the Good Samaritan,] everybody knows the robber is bad--but doesn't Jesus also imply an indictment on the priest and Levite? . . . The priest and Levite are over here. They are 'right...
Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.
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...
If more Christians today summon the courage to take seriously the dark sides of our history, we will wake up to the degree to which our religion still interprets the Bible exactly as our misguided anc...
I am convinced that Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion; he came to proclaim a new kingdom.
It turns out that the famous dictum, associated with Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, can run both ways: yes, without God everything is theoretically permissible... but believers can find ways to use God...
When wealth is your god, weapons are your sacrament, and your own children are your sacrifice—
When would-be reformers arise, they are rejected as heretics, turncoats, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace, traitors, and enemies.
What if the Christian faith is supposed to exist in a variety of forms rather than just one imperial one? What if it is both more stable and more agile—more responsive to the Holy Spirit—when it exist...
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.
This papal document—which has not yet been repudiated by the Catholic Church—was the basis for the Christian justification of colonialism and the building of competitive Spanish, Portuguese, British,...
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...
Cause-effect looks back and asks, What caused this? Purpose looks up or ahead, and asks, And why was it caused? For what purpose? For what end? Cause-effect looks for a force pushing events from behin...
God is not the tribal deity of one group of chosen people. God is not for us and against all others. God is for us and for them, too. God loves everyone everywhere, no exceptions.
We are not scholars researching an ancient Chinese emperor — a matter of objectivity and disinterestedness; we are sons and daughters who want to get to know our father — someone with whom we have an...
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...
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...
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