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,...
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...
Such a possibility raises a question: if one dares to let one’s traditional and inherited Christian understanding of God be converted under the influence of Jesus, can one still be considered a Christ...
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...
Sometimes, webecome so familiar with the primal sacred story of the Bible that we need some fresh takes on it, telling us the same thing in different ways, or giving us some new vantage points to see...
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.
Postmoderns are not less interested in religion than ever before. Indeed, they are exploring new religious experiences like never before. The church has simply given them a less interesting religion t...
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...
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...
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...
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...
If, for you, orthodox means finally getting it right or getting it straight, mine is a pretty disappointing, curvy orthodoxy. But if, for you, orthodoxy isn’t a list of correct doctrines, but rather t...
I guess you could say that the Bible is a book that doesn't try to tell you what to think. Instead, it trys to teach you how to think. It stretches your thinking; it challenges you to think bigger and...
Growing numbers of us are acknowledging with grief that many forms of supremacy—Christian, white, male, heterosexual, and human—are deeply embedded not just in Christian history but also in Christian...
When theologians read the Bible through the lens of the Exodus narrative, they are called liberation theologians, but their counterparts who read it through the Greco-Roman narrative are never labeled...
The more one respects Jesus, the more one must be brokenhearted, embarrassed, furious, or some combination thereof when one considers what we Christians have done with Jesus. That’s certainly true whe...
[Spiritual] Practices are not for know-it-alls. Practices are for those who feel the need for change, growth, development, learning. Practices are for disciples.
We might say that two thousand years ago, Jesus inserted into the human imagination a radical new vision of God—nondominating, nonviolent, supreme in service, and self-giving. That vision was so radic...
We hate those times of weakness, but I can see why life would be engineered to bring us to them; without them, we might never learn what faith is at all. Someone has said that you never know if your f...
Spiritual practices are ways of becoming awake and staying awake to God.