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...
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...
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...
[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.
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...
When wealth is your god, weapons are your sacrament, and your own children are your sacrifice—
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...
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...
He had what we often lack — the maturity to see that faith isn’t something you either have or don’t have, but something that ebbs and flows in the life and soul of every individual. Doubt isn’t the op...
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...
I am convinced that Jesus didn’t come to start a new religion; he came to proclaim a new kingdom.
When would-be reformers arise, they are rejected as heretics, turncoats, troublemakers, disturbers of the peace, traitors, and enemies.
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.
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.
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...
The wise preacher of Ecclesiastes might say, There is a time for everything—a time to be laid-back and a time to be outraged; a time to be tolerant and a time to stand up and say, ‘I’m not going to ta...
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...
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...
Imagine if organized religion organized billions of people and trillions of dollars to tackle the challenges that our economic and political systems are afraid or unwilling to tackle—a planet ravaged...
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