Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.
Too often we put the gospel of Jesus through the strainer of consumerist-capitalism and retain only the thin broth that this modern-day Caesar lets pass through.
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...
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...
That is what mature faith requires — not pride over how much one sees and understands, but humility, the feeling that one is still a child, certain of so little, still so dependent on God and others,...
Schoolchildren don’t normally learn this poem about Columbus’s second voyage to Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic today): In fourteen hundred and ninety-five, sixteen hundred people he kidn...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
I do know this about pride: pride is tiring, a cruel task-master, a complicator, a destroyer. Humility, in contrast, relaxes, refreshes, relieves, simplifies, renews. To the degree that becoming child...
What today throws at you will force you to become better or bitter for tomorrow; it will push you toward breakdown or breakthrough...
People have no idea how strong a pull sex, money, and power have on them until they try to resist their pull.
Trying to stop people from learning, sharing, and loving is a losing game because it means working against God and the plotline of God's universe.
Our interpretations reveal less about God or the Bible than they do about ourselves. They reveal what we want to defend, what we want to attack, what we want to ignore, what we’re unwilling to questio...
I'm raising the question of whether focusing on the afterlife beyond history can unintentionally but tragically lead to the abandonment of this earth and this life.
I have no doubt that Jesus would actually practice the neighborliness he preached rather than following our example of religious supremacy, hostility, fear, isolation, misinformation, exclusion, or de...
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.
Even though Pope Urban VIII reversed the pronouncements of his predecessors by declaring slavery unacceptable in the mid-seventeenth century, the vast majority of Protestant Christians in America cons...
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...
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