The only viable response to religious hostility is love, empathy, compassion, understanding—not more hostility. (What could be more pathetic than a hostile fight against hostility?)
If we speak of an angry God at all, we will speak of a God angry at indifference, angry at apathy, angry at racism and violence, angry at inhumanity, angry at waste, angry at destruction, angry at inj...
If you don't want to worship a guy you can beat up, then I might humbly suggest you reconsider Caesar and the Greco-Roman narrative. It sounds like 'Christ and him crucified' is not for you. At least...
Jesus faithfully and courageously represented the nonviolent and loving heart of God. Jesus and his way of nonviolent, self-giving love, the text suggests, will earn the trust of all humanity. We will...
Motivated thus by their beliefs in God and their lust for gold—as dangerous a cocktail today as then—the Spanish Christians ravaged Latin America, as did their Portuguese counterparts. Bartolomé concl...
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...
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...
[Fasting is] a way of making sure we haven't let the rhythms of the everyday put us to sleep, a way to make sure that our habits have not become addictions...
There is a difference — subtle but very significant — between having faith in my faith (i.e., faith in my intellectual concepts about God — another way of saying leaning on my own understanding) and h...
When any sector of the church stops learning, God simply overflows the structures that are in the way and works outside them with those willing to learn.
As a committed Christian, I have always struggled with locked doors—doors by which we on the inside lock out the others—Jews, Muslims, Mormons, liberals, doubters, agnostics, gay folks, whomever. The...
But there is a more catholic understanding of the term apostolic: it means missional. The apostles were those called together to learn (as disciples) so they could be sent out on a mission (which is w...
Enter faith, and a whole new factor enters the equation. Words like impossible seem out of place. Despair and cynicism feel like insults to God. Hope grows, and love, and therefore motivation to care,...
If I could seriously ponder ending my life, then I can do anything. I can change anything in my life. So instead of ending my life altogether, I’ll end my life as I’ve been living it and start a new k...
In case after case in the past, there is a kind of Bible-quoting intoxication under the influence of which we religious people lose the ability to distinguish between what God says and what we say God...
Isn’t the real scandal not that our religious leaders might be imagined walking across a road or talking as friends together in a bar, but rather that their followers are found speaking against one an...
So if God is forgotten, we want to join God in being forgotten. So if God is rejected and opposed and misunderstood and misrepresented, we want to suffer each indignity and sorrow with God.
Some people--and I pray I will be one of them--never forget what it was like, which enables them to mentor people of any age.
Surely many courageous Christians spoke out against the savagery of their so-called civilized fellow Christians? And surely many compassionate Christians spoke out for the humanity of the so-called sa...
The life-and-death question for each of our churches and denominations may boil down to this: are we a club for the elite who pretend to have arrived or a school for disciples who are still on the way...
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